Christopher H. Sterling is Professor of Media and Public Affairs and of Public Policy and Public Administration at The George Washington University (GW). He earned his B.S. (political science, 1965) and M.S. and Ph.D (both in communication, 1967 and 1969, respectively) from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He has been an academic for four decades and has served as a member of the GW faculty since 1982. He directed the university's former graduate telecommunication program from 1984 to 1994, and again from 2001 to 2003. He served as associate dean for graduate affairs in the arts and sciences from 1994 to 2001. Before coming to GW, he served as a special assistant to one of the members of the Federal Communications Commission from 1980 to 1982. Through the 1970s, he was on the communications faculty at Temple University in Philadelphia.

Dr. Sterling's primary research interests focus on the history of and policy for both electronic media and tele communications. With several books still forthcoming, he has authored or edited some 25 monographs since the first appeared in 1973. He was general editor of a three-volume and multi-author Encyclopedia of Radio (2004), and the more recent Military Communications: From Ancient Times to the 21st Century (2007), a one-volume encyclopedia on that topic. He edits Communication Booknotes Quarterly and serves on the editorial boards of six scholarly journals. Among his recent books are Sounds of Change: A History of FM Broadcasting in America (co-author, 2008) and Shaping American Tele communications: A History of Technology, Policy, and Economics (co-author, 2006). Among his earlier monographs are Stay Tuned: A History of American Broadcasting (co-author, 3rd ed., 2002), The Focal Guide to Electronic Media (CD-ROM editor, 1998), and Broadcasting in America: A Survey of Electronic Media (co-author with others, several editions). Sterling has also contributed articles to many scholarly books and journals (among them is “Pioneering Risk: Lessons from the U.S. Teletext/Videotex Failure” in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 2006), as well as literally hundreds of encyclopedia entries and essays.