Dr. Thomas Simonson is Professor at Ecole Polytechnique, Paris, France and a senior CNRS scientist. He is active in the development and application of computational methods, including free energy simulation techniques. He is especially interested in electrostatic interactions and structure-function relationships in biomolecules and engineering protein-ligand interactions. His early work examined dielectric relaxation in proteins, providing first principles estimates of microscopic and macroscopic susceptibilities. Subsequent work focussed on major biochemical processes where electrostatics is central, including acid/base, redox processes, and ligand binding. Since 1989, Dr. Simonson has studied protein-ligand recognition with free energy simulations, developing software, methodology, and theory. Early work used RNase S and SNase as models to understand protein stability. Subsequent work focussed on the Ras oncoprotein, its downstream target Raf, the kinases Abl and Src, translational GTPases, and several aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases. In 2005, Dr. Simonson entered the field of computational protein design (CPD), developing a large body of code, methodology, and test systems. He created the Proteins@Home distributed computing platform, which used over 30.000 volunteer computers in 100 countries (Chem Eng News, 2007).