Biophysicist Jeremy Smith became the first Governor’s Chair appointee on October 1, 2006. Smith earned the bachelor’s degree in biophysics from Leeds University in England and conducted his doctoral research at the Institut Laue-Langevin in Grenoble, France, an international neutron science center. At the time of his appointment, he was the head of the computational molecular biophysics group (established in 1998) at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. From 1989 to 1998, he was molecular simulation group leader with France’s Atomic Energy Commission (CEA Saclay), and from 1985 to 1989 he was a biophysics research associate and lecturer at Harvard. His research areas are in protein dynamics, conformational change, and enzyme reaction mechanisms. He had published more than 160 research articles in these areas at the time of his appointment.