René de Borst received an MSc in civil engineering and a PhD from TU Delft (both cum laude). Starting his career at the Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) he has become a Distinguished Professor at TU Delft, and subsequently at TU Eindhoven. He has been the 10th Regius Professor of Civil Engineering and Mechanics at the University of Glasgow, and is currently the inaugural holder of the Centenary Chair of Civil Engineering at the University of Sheffield. He has held Visiting Professorships in Paris, Metz, Lyon, Milan, Barcelona, Stuttgart, Minneapolis, Albuquerque and Tokyo. He is, inter alia, recipient of the Computational Mechanics Award of the International Association of Computational Mechanics, the Max-Planck Forschungspreis, the Spinoza Prize, the Grand Prize of the Japanese Society of Computational Engineering and Science, the O.C. Zienkiewicz Medal of the Polish Association of Computational Mechanics, and the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award. He has been inducted in the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, and the Royal Academy of Engineering (London). He is an Officer in the National Order of Merit [France], has been awarded an honorary doctorate by the Institut National des Sciences Appliquées de Lyon, and has held an ERC Advanced Grant. He has held several administrative posts, including Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Aerospace Engineering at TU Delft and Dean of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at TU Eindhoven. After moving to the UK he has also remained active in the Netherlands, among others as chair of the panel “Engineering” of the Nationale Wetenschapsagenda, and as chair of the Division of Science and Engineering of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Starting in geomechanics, René de Borst has been active in various disciplines, including structural, aerospace and mechanical engineering. He currently focuses (again) on computational geomechanics. More recently, he has also built up an interest in computational geophysics.