Jean-René Roy is a retired astronomer who was a professor at Université Laval, Québec, from 1977 to 2000. Since then he has served as Deputy Director and Head of Science at the Gemini Observatory in Hawai'i and Chile and worked at the Large Facilities Office of the National Science Foundation and finally at the Space Telescope Science Institute. He has done research on the Sun, the interstellar medium, and the evolution of gas-rich galaxies. A new edition of his previous book, A Question and Answer Guide to Astronomy, was published in 2017.