Gene Myers was born on December 31, 1953. In 2012, he joined the scientific community in Dresden as the Founding Director of the Center for Systems Biology (CSBD) and Director at the MPI-CBG. Previously, he had been a group leader at the HHMI Janelia Farm Research Campus (JFRC) since its inception in 2005. Gene came to the JFRC from UC Berkeley where he was on the faculty of Computer Science from 2003 to 2005. He was formerly Vice President of Informatics Research at Celera Genomics for four years. Prior to that Gene was on the faculty of the University of Arizona for 17 years and he received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Colorado in 1981. He was voted the most influential in bioinformatics in 2001 by Genome Technology Magazine and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2003. In 2004, Gene Myers won the International Max Planck Research Prize, was inducted into Leopoldina, the German Academy of Science, in 2006, and was awarded an honarary doctorate at ETH, Zurich.