Peer Bork, PhD, is senior group leader and joint head of the Structural and Computational Biology unit at EMBL, a European research organization with headquarters in Heidelberg. He also holds an appointment at the Max-Delbrueck-Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin. Dr Bork received his PhD in Biochemistry (1990) and his Habilitation in Theoretical Biophysics (1995). He works in various areas of computational biology and systems analysis with a focus on function prediction, comparative analysis and data integration. His group has published more than 500 research articles in international, peer-reviewed journals, among them more than 50 in Nature, Science and Cell. According to ISI (analyzing the last 10 years), Dr. Bork is currently the most cited European researcher in Molecular Biology and Genetics. He is on the editorial board of a number of journals including Science and PloS Biology, and functions as senior editor of the journal Molecular Systems Biology. Dr Bork co-founded five biotech companies, two of which went public. More than 25 of his former associates now hold professorships or other group leader positions in prominent institutions all over the world.  He received the "Nature award for creative mentoring" for his achievements in nurturing and stimulating young scientists. He was also the recipient of the prestigious "Royal Society and Academie des Science Microsoft award" for the advancement of science using computational methods and obtained a competitive "ERC advanced investigator grant".