Prof. David Winkler is a one of Australia’s leading physical chemists. He is a boundary-crossing, multi-skilled lateral thinker with unusually broad, formal academic training in physics, chemistry, chemical engineering, and mathematics. He has a strong track record in computational design of drug candidates (25 patents). He provided the seminal design that resulted in the creation of the antibiotics spin off company Betabiotics (early 2000s), and recently provide the core technology for the stock market float of the biotechnology company, Vectus Biosystems (Feb 2016). He invented four clinical trial candidate drugs for this company and several more to treat the incurable blood cancer, myelofibrosis, for which he is currently seeking venture capital funding. He also transferred Bayesian neural network technology to the BioRAD Corporation, and his analysis of gene expression microarray data using Bayesian sparse feature selection method created the IP for the Boston stem cell company Asymmetrex. He has received several scientific awards: CSIRO Business Excellence Medal (2003); CSIRO One CSIRO award (2005); CSIRO Service from Science award (2006); Newton Turner award for Exceptional Senior Scientists (2012); Adrien Albert award (medicinal chemistry award) from RACI (2014); Royal Academy of Engineering (UK) Distinguished Fellowship (2015); CRC for Polymers Chairman’s Award for Excellence in Commercialization (2015); and ACS Herman Skolnik award (2017). He is a Professor of Chemistry & Physics at La Trobe Institute for Molecular Science, Adjunct Professor of Medicinal Chemistry at Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Visiting Professor in Pharmacy at the University of Nottingham, and a Fellow in evolutionary robotics at CSIRO Data61.