Dennis Bray is Emeritus Professor (active) at the newly constituted Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience, University of Cambridge. He is coauthor of multiple editions of Molecular Biology of the Cell and Essential Cell Biology and author of Cell Movements, now in its second edition. Bray has had a long research career with over 100 primary publications in the fields of nerve growth and cell motility and, more recently, bacterial chemotaxis. His current work on the molecular basis of the E. coli signalling pathway is computationally based and involves collaborations with physicists and physical chemists. In recent years he has been widely sought as a lecturer and instructor at meetings and courses on the interface between cell biology and physics at locations such as MBL Woods Hole, Caltech, Aspen Center for Physics, MPI Dresden, and AMOLF Amsterdam. Dennis Bray is an enthusiastic advocate of the computational approach to living cells and his work provides insight into the evolution of signalling pathways, the formation of intracellular protein complexes, the propagation of allosteric interactions in protein assemblies, the generation of intracellular gradients, and the combinatorial complexity of proteins in signal pathways.