Folker Meyer is a computational biologist at Argonne National Laboratory, a Professor at the Department of Medicine, University of Chicago and a senior fellow at the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago. He is also deputy division director of the Biology Division at Argonne National Laboratory and a senior fellow at the Institute of Genomics and Systems Biology (a joint Argonne National Laboratory and University of Chicago Institute). He trained as a computer scientists and started to work with biologists early on in his career. It was that exposure to interesting biological problems that sparked his interest in building software systems to tackle biological problems, mostly in the field of genomics or post-genomics. In the past he has been best known for his leadership role in the development of the GenDB genome annotation system, he has also played an active role in the design and implementation of several high-performance computing platforms. His current work focuses on the analysis of shotgun metagenomics data sets and on the MG-RAST community resource for metagenomics. Shotgun metagenomics is benefitting directly from the current advances in sequencing technology, leading to dramatic growth in the number scientists using this approach and the number and size of the data sets being produced. He also has an interest in microbial genomics and the analysis of complete microbial genomes and is a member of the RAST project. He is a founding member of the Earthmicrobiome project (EMP). He is a member of the Genomics Standards Consortium (GSC).