Tsutomu Shimomura is a senior fellow at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, where he works on problems in areas as diverse as computational physics and computer security. He came to the University of California at San Diego in 1989 to join the physics department as a research scientist.
He has studied physics with Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman at the California Institute of Technology and has worked as a research associate with physicist Steven Wolfram. In the summer of 1984 he worked at Thinking Machines Corporation, helping the Cambridge, Mass.-based massively parallel computer start-up company design a disk system to support the rapid movement of vast databases.
In the fall of 1984 he became a staff physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he was one of the architects of an advanced parallel computer. He also worked in the Laboratory's theoretical division with Brosl Hasslacher, one of the nation's leading researchers in computational physics. Shimomura assisted Hasslacher in developing a radical approach to simulating the flow of fluids based on a new model of computation, known as lattice gas automata. It takes advantage of natural parallelism and dramatically speeds computing on a variety of problems.
In recent years Shimomura has also worked in the area of computer security research. He has consulted with a number of government agencies on security and computer crime issues. In 1992 he testified before a Congressional Committee chaired by Representative Edward Markey on issues surrounding the lack of privacy and security in cellular telephones. In February 1995 he helped several online service and Internet companies track down computer outlaw Kevin Mitnick, who had stolen software and electronic mail from Shimomura's computers. He is the author of Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of America's Most Wanted Computer Outlaw — By The Man Who Did It, with John Markoff (Hyperion, January 1996).
A Japanese citizen, Shimomura was raised in Princeton, New Jersey. He lives in the San Diego area where he is an active inline skater. He is also an avid cross country skier.