Jeremy Gunawardena is a professor in the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School. He received his PhD in algebraic topology from Trinity College, Cambridge in 1981. Following this, he served as the L.E. Dickson Instructor at the University of Chicago and as a Research Fellow in Pure Mathematics at his alma mater. In 1987, he joined Hewlett-Packard's research division, where he ultimately became the Director of Basic Research in Europe by 1994. Gunawardena has held positions at prestigious institutions including Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as being an invited professor at École Normale Supérieure in 2000. Between 1999 and 2001, he was a member of the Council for the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council in the UK. He transitioned from HP in 2001 to take on the role of Visiting Scientist at the Bauer Center for Genomics Research at Harvard, which later evolved into the FAS Center for Systems Biology. His research focuses on the complex field of signal transduction processes and information processing within mammalian cells, emphasizing the significance of protein post-translational modifications and the development of analytical methods for modeling cellular mechanisms.