PERSONAL BACKGROUND
- NAME: Tsutomu Shimomura
- BORN: October 23, 1964
- WHERE: Nagoya, Japan
- OCCUPATION: Physicist and Programmer
Tsutomu shimomura was the son of Osamu Shimomura, winner of 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He grew up in Princeton New Jersey and there he attended at Princeton High School. At Caltech he studied under Nobel laureate Richard Feynman. After Caltech, he went on to work at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he continued his hands-on education in the position of staff physicist with Brosl Hasslacher and others on subjects such as Lattice Gas Automata. In 1989, he became a research scientist in computational physics at the University of California at San Diego, and senior fellow at the San Diego Supercomputer Center. Shimomura also became a noted computer security expert, working for the National Security Agency. In 1992, he testified before Congress on issues regarding the privacy and security (or lack thereof) on cellular telephones. He is best known for events in 1995, when he assisted with tracking down the “computer outlaw” Kevin Mitnick. Shimomura and journalist John Markoff wrote a book, Takedown, about the pursuit, and the book was later adapted into a movie of the same name. Shimomura worked for Sun Microsystems during the late 1990s. Shimomura presently lives in the Reno/Tahoe area.
