Lalith Perera currently works as the head of the Computational Chemistry and Molecular Modeling Core at the Genome Integrity and Structural Biology Laboratory (GISBL), National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). Lalith's research focus is in the areas of Computational and Physical Chemistry, Theoretical Chemistry, and Chemical Thermodynamics. Among his current research interests, metal ion function in DNA repair via DNA polymerase catalysis, structural implications in the nuclear receptor activation, and computational studies of allergen proteins take a high priority. He earned his B.Sc. in Chemistry, with minors in Mathematics and Physics, from the University of Colombo in Sri Lanka. He received his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry in 1990 at the University of Maine at Orono. He pursued postdoctoral research in Computational Chemistry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He later joined UNC-Chapel Hill’s Information and Technology Services Department as a Computational Scientist within the Research Computing Group. In 2005, he joined in the Computational Chemistry group of the Laboratory of Structural Biology at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS/NIH).