Kim Nasmyth currently holds the Whitley Chair in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Oxford. He obtained his PhD from the University of Edinburgh (1977), was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington, Seattle and was a Robertson fellow at Cold Spring Harbor. After working at the MRC Laboratory of molecular biology in Cambridge for six years, Kim Nasmyth moved in 1987 to the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (I.M.P) in Vienna and was director there from 1997 until 2005. His work has addressed the mechanisms by which genes are turned on and off during development, how DNA replication and the cell division cycle is controlled, and how sister chromatids are held together from S phase until M phase and then disjoined at the onset of anaphase. It has been recognized by several awards including the Gairdner foundation prize (2007), the Boveri award for Molecular Cancer Genetics (2003), the Croonian lecture/Medal of the Royal society (2002), the Austrian Wittgenstein prize (1999), the Louis Jeantet prize for Medicine (1997), the Unilever Science prize (1996), and the FEBS Silver Medal (1995). He is a fellow of the Royal Society (1989), a member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (1999), and a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1999).