**About the Special Issue Editor**

**Istvan Simon** was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1947. He graduated as a physicist and habilitated in biology and in physics. He is a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and currently a professor emeritus at the Research Centre of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, where he has been since 1969. He turned his attention to computational analysis at Cornell University, where he spent several years in the group of Harold A. Scheraga. He continued his career in this field in Hungary, and pioneered computational protein structure research at the end of the 1970s. He has published 8 book chapters, 132 papers. The publications have been cited over 12,000 times, and he has twice been listed among the highly cited researchers according to the Web of Science. Together with his research group he has provided 16 databases and prediction servers on the World Wide Web. These include the prediction of "stabilization centers", i.e., residue pairs that are responsible for keeping a protein's structure intact, the prediction of disulfide-forming cysteines (CYSREDOX), and a number of top-cited transmembrane prediction algorithms (DAS, HMMTOP, and PDBTM). Recently, his group has uncovered the statistical thermodynamics forming the background of protein disorder, and provided the corresponding prediction server, IUPred, followed by the prediction of functional regions of disordered proteins (ANCHOR). The strength of these methods is the groundbreaking discovery of principles underlying protein structure organization.
