Gisbert Schneider studied biochemistry and computer science at the Free University of Berlin, Germany, where he received his doctoral degree in 1994. After several international post-doctoral research activities he joined F.Hoffmann-La Roche Pharmaceuticals in Basel, Switzerland, where he headed the cheminformatics group until 2001. He received his habilitation and venia legendi in biochemistry and bioinformatics from the University of Freiburg, Germany. From 2002 to 2009 he was Full Professor of Chem- and Bioinformatics (Beilstein Endowed Chair) at Goethe-University Frankfurt, Germany. In 2010 he joined ETH Zurich, Switzerland, as a Full Professor of Computer-Assisted Drug Design. Professor Schneider is the guest editor of this special focus issue on computational chemistry and has served on the editorial board since the journal launched in 2009. He spoke to Future Medicinal Chemistry about how he became involved in the field, the effects advances in software have had on research and how computational ch...