Jürgen Pleiss obtained his PhD degree at the Max-Planck-Institute of Biology, Tübingen, under the supervision of Fritz Jähnig. He then joined the company Biostructure S.A., Strasbourg, to develop software for protein modelling. Since 1995, he is head of the bioinformatics group at the Institute of Biochemistry and Technical Biochemistry (University of Stuttgart), where he obtained his habilitation in 2001. His research activities focus on enzyme design by combining bioinformatics and molecular simulation methods, and on the application of computational biology in white and red biotechnology.