Andrew Emerson graduated in Chemistry from the University of Southampton (UK) in 1987. He stayed in Southampton to study for a doctorate in Computational Chemistry which was awarded in 1991. After many years in research in the UK and Italy in the field of Molecular Dynamics, he joined the Cineca supercomputer centre located in Bologna, Italy in 2000 as an applications specialist. He currently works at Cineca in a number of European projects, including Exscalate4Cov, and gives courses on computational chemistry and parallel computing. In 1997 he was awarded the title “Young Scientist of the Year” by the British Liquid Crystal society. He is married with one child and lives in Bologna.