Richard A. Mathies (Fig. 1) is a professor of chemistry at the University of California (UC) at Berkeley. His early work at UC was on the use of resonance Raman and time-resolved optical spectroscopy to elucidate the structure and reaction dynamics of energy and information-transducing photoactive proteins called rhodopsins. His work on the Human Genome Project led to the development of high-throughput platform technologies including capillary array electrophoresis and energy transfer fluorescent dye labels for DNA sequencing and analysis. He has also pioneered the development of microfabricated capillary electrophoresis devices, capillary array electrophoresis microplates and microfabriated integrated sample preparation and detection methods. He is the co-founder of the Center for Analytical Biotechnology at UC Berkeley. Mathies was interviewed at the BIOMEMS and Biomedical Nanotechnology conference in Columbus, Ohio, 21-25 September 2001, where he gave a talk about capillary array electrophoresis-based microprocessors. Such devices could be used as point-of-care clinical and genetic analyzers, in integrated microfluidic sequencing chips and in DNA-based computing.