Leon Stok studied electrical engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, where he graduated with honors in 1986. He obtained his PhD degree from Eindhoven University in 1991. He worked at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center as part of the team that developed BooleDozer, the IBM logic synthesis tool. Subsequently, he managed IBM’s logic synthesis group and initiated the development of the first physical synthesis system: PDS, IBM’s Placement Driven Synthesis tool. From 1999 to 2004, he led all of IBM’s design automation research as the Senior Manager Design Automation at IBM Research. He is currently Vice President, Electronic Design Automation at IBM. He entered the field of Design Automation 25 years ago intrigued by the type of problems being posed by Moore’s law. He has enjoyed working on problems from high-level synthesis to prescriptive layout design and DFM. In these 25 years, he attended most of the Design Automation Conferences, as a presenter of his original work in papers, a reviewer of the state of the art in tutorials or as a panelist to give his opinion on current issues. He served in many roles as a member of the DAC executive committee and as the chair of the 48th DAC. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.