Dr Darren Martin has been selected as the first Sydney Brenner Fellow. He is 36 years old, with academic qualifications obtained in genetics at the University of Natal, and virology at the University of Cape Town (UCT). He is based at UCT’s Institute of Infectious Disease and Molecular Medicine, in the HIV laboratory of Professor Carolyn Williamson and the UCT Bioinformatics Unit. He has published 21 papers in the international peer-reviewed literature, and three widely used science software sets. He works in the exploding field of using bioinformatics (computer analysis of the complete genetic sequences of living organisms to deduce how the genes coded therein work, individually or together, to support life and explain disease). He is particularly interested in the effects of genetic recombination (crossing over between different chromosomes during reproduction of organisms) and is trying to determine whether viruses that have recombined during replication will survive best if they cause minimum disruption of critically important interaction networks between gene products.