Prof. David A Winkler has a PhD in radioastronomy and microwave spectroscopy and degrees in chemistry, chemical engineering, and physics. He was a Fellow, Board Chair and Honorary General Secretary of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute, a Director and member of the Board Executive of Science and Technology Australia, a member of the Australian Academy of Science's National Committee for  Chemistry, a member of the Board, Past President and Fellow of the Asian  Federation for Medicinal Chemistry, and of the Federation of Asian Chemical Societies. He has published over 250  research papers and book chapters, has an H-index of 63, and is an inventor on 25 patents. He is ranked 136th out of 100,000 medicinal chemists (Stanford 2023). An important aspect of his research has been dissecting the quantitative structure-activity method, rebuilding it with modern mathematical and artificial intelligence methods, and adapting evolutionary approaches to the design of bioactive molecules and materials for diagnostics, therapeutics, and regeneration. He was a foundation member of the CSIRO complex systems science group and established and published seminal cited papers in this field.