Temple Smith graduated with a Ph.D. in Nuclear Physics from University of Colorado. He did a joint postdoctoral fellowship under the direction of the mathematician, Stanislaw Ulam and the molecular biologist, John Sadler. He is a co-developer of the Smith-Waterman sequence alignment algorithm, and was one of the founders of GenBank at Los Alamos. He also founded the Molecular Biology Computer Research Resource at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, which was later moved as the BioMolecular Engineering Research Center to the College of Engineering at Boston University since 1991. At Boston University he is a professor in the departments of Biomedical Engineering and Pharmacology. He has published nearly two hundred original research journal articles, a dozen review articles and four book chapters. Temple Smith is also a co-founder of Modular Genetics Inc., a gene engineering company. Here the focus has been on the development of high throughput methods for the generation of novel bio synthetic chemicals through microbial fermentation systems. His research is centred on the application of various computer science and mathematical methods for the discovery of the syntactic and semantic patterns in nucleic acid and amino acid sequences, and their evolution. These include the development of new sequence pattern extraction tools (PIMA), multi-domain dissection methods, and protein inverse folding or threading prediction algorithms. Temple Smith has carried out research applications exploiting such methods on problems ranging from the time calibration of HIV and Papilloma viral evolution through the modelling of the three dimensional structure of the WD repeat protein family and that of the translational GTPases. His current focus is on early evolution, for example, that of a novel family of apoptotic regulatory proteins, the Lifeguard family and the ribosomal proteins.