Ruhong Zhou IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 218, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 (ruhongzus.ibm.com). Dr. Zhou is a Research Staff Scientist at the Computational Biology Center of the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Chemistry at Columbia University. He received his Ph.D. degree from Columbia University in 1997. He has authored and coauthored more than 70 journal publications and 7 patents, delivered numerous invited talks at major conferences and universities, and chaired and co-chaired several conferences in this area. He won the Hammett Award in 1997 from Columbia University, the DEC Award in 1995 from the American Chemical Society on Computational Chemistry, and the IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement Award in 2005. His current research interests include development of novel methods and algorithms for computational biology and bioinformatics, as well as large-scale simulations for protein folding, ligand–receptor binding, and protein structure prediction.

Maria Eleftheriou IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 218, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 (mariaeus.ibm.com). Dr. Eleftheriou is a researcher at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. For the past few years, she has been working mainly on the Blue Gene* Project. In particular, she has contributed to the design and the implementation of parallel algorithms, parallel applications, and parallel programming models, and she has studied the performance of parallel scientific applications for the Blue Gene/L architecture. Another area of interest is large-scale simulations, addressing questions of biological interest, particularly in the area of protein folding. She received her master's degree in engineering in 1995 and her Ph.D. degree in chemistry in 1999, from Brown University.

Chung-Chau Hon University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong, China (h9826299hkusua.hku.hk). Dr. Hon is a Research Staff Member in the Department of Zoology at the University of Hong Kong. He received his M.Phil. degree in molecular virology and a Ph.D. degree in virological bioinformatics from the University of Hong Kong. During his graduate studies, in 2006 he also worked at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center as a summer intern, where he focused on the analysis of molecular simulation trajectories for lysozyme. Dr. Hon's research interests have centered on molecular modeling of viral capsid proteins, viral epidemiology, and evolutionary virology.

Robert S. Germain IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 218, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 (rgermainus.ibm.com). Dr. Germain manages the Biomolecular Dynamics and Scalable Modeling Group within the Computational Biology Center at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. He received his A.B. degree in physics from Princeton University in 1982 and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in physics from Cornell University. After receiving his doctorate in 1989, Dr. Germain joined the T. J. Watson Research Center as a Research Staff Member in the Physical Sciences Department and later the VLSI/Scalable Parallel Systems Packaging Department. From 1995 to 1998, he was project leader for the development of a large-scale fingerprint identification system using an indexing scheme (FLASH) developed at the IBM Research Division. Since 2000, Dr. Germain has been responsible for the science and associated application portions of the Blue Gene Project. His current research interests include the parallel implementation of algorithms for high-performance scientific computing, the development of new programming models for parallel computing, and applications of high-performance computing to challenging scientific problems in computational biology. Dr. Germain is a member of the ACM, IEEE, and the American Physical Society.

Ajay K. Royyuru. IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 218, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 (ajayrus.ibm.com). Dr. Royyuru is Senior Manager of the Computational Biology Center at the IBM Research Division, where he leads the teams engaged in research in bioinformatics, structural biology, protein science, Blue Gene applications, functional genomics, systems biology, computational neuroscience, and biomedical imaging. He obtained his Ph.D. degree in molecular biology from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, in 1993 and then conducted postdoctoral work in structural biology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, New York. Prior to joining IBM in 1998, he spent 2 years developing structural biology software at Accelrys. Currently, his work focuses on collaborative research at the interface of information technology and biology. Working with biologists and institutions around the world, he is engaged in research that will advance personalized, information-based medicine. Dr. Royyuru leads the IBM Research teams working with National Geographic Society on the Genographic Project and with The Scripps Research Institute on modeling emerging viral diseases such as influenza.

Bruce J. Berne Columbia University, Department of Chemistry, 3000 Broadway, New York, NY 10027 (bb8columbia.edu). Dr. Berne is Higgins Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Chemical Engineering at Columbia University. He has been at Columbia since 1966 and has published more than 300 publications and authored three books. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Berne has won numerous awards including the Alexander von Humoldt-Stiftung Senior Scientist Award (1992), the American Chemical Society Award in Theoretical Chemistry (1995), the Joseph O. Hirschfelder Prize in Theoretical Chemistry (2001), the Joel Henry Hildebrand Award in the Theoretical and Experimental Chemistry of Liquids of the American Chemical Society (2002), and an IBM Research Achievement Award (2005). He has also delivered numerous honorary lectures.

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