Klaus-Peter Zauner is a Senior Lecturer in the Agents, Interaction and Complexity group (AIC) of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. He was born in Stuttgart, soldered together a Sinclair ZX81 as his first computer and went on to study Biochemistry at the University of Tuebingen. Intrigued by Nature’s molecular scale information processing mechanisms he left Tuebingen in 1992 for Detroit to join Michael Conrad’s Biocomputing Group—at the time one of the very few places with research in molecular computing and likely the first computer science group with its own wet-laboratory. Under Michael Conrad’s mentorship he worked on conformational computing and enzymatic computing.

Klaus-Peter received his PhD in computer science from Wayne State University, Detroit in 2001. He started his academic career as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Wayne State University, then returned to Europe in 2002 to work with Peter Dittrich in the Bio Systems Analysis Group at the University of Jena, before taking up a Lectureship at the University of Southampton in 2003.

He leads a team that works across the boundaries of (bio-)chemistry, electronics, microfluidics, and computer science to integrate information processing into physical and chemical systems. The aim of this endeavour is to facilitate a step-change in the complexity of synthetic materials and thus narrow the gap between the intricate material organisation found in the biological world and what is available in the present engineering tool-kit.

Klaus-Peter was a Microsoft Research European Fellow, recipient of a Leverhulme Research Leadership Award, and is a founding editor of the International Journal of Unconventional Computing. He collaborates nationally and internationally to shape the direction of his nascent research field.