Shu-Kun Lin was born on 24 March 1957 in Hanchuan, Hubei Province, China. He graduated with BSc from Wuhan University in January 1982, majoring in inorganic chemistry, he studied physical chemistry in the Lanzhou Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (1982-1986, MSc in 1985) and in the USA (UofL, January 1987 to July 1989). He received his doctorate (organic chemistry) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH-Zürich) in 1992 following studies over three years in the group of Prof. Dr. Bernhard Jaun, Laboratory of Organic Chemistry. Shu-Kun Lin then worked at Ciba-Geigy Ltd. for three years, first as a postdoctoral research associate in organic synthesis and drug discovery, then at the Dyestuffs Division of Ciba-Geigy Ltd. which involved dyestuff R&D and production. He also stayed for 6 months in 1996 in Prof. Dr. B. Giese's group, Organic Chemistry Institute, University of Basel, Switzerland, as a postdoctoral research associate. Though he had an entropy theory called similarity principle related to thermodynamics and information theory, he did not believe the theory to be important enough to deserve any financial support. Thus, in 1996, Shu-Kun Lin initiated the samples collection and exchange project (MDPI Samples Exchange), and founded the international organization, Molecular Diversity Preservation International (MDPI) in Switzerland to implement this. In 1996 he launched the first MDPI journal Molecules to encourage authors to deposit research samples of compounds from their work. He is the founder or co-founder of several other open-access journals: Entropy (1999), International Journal of Molecular Sciences (2000), Sensors (2001), Marine Drugs (2003) and International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (2004). He became the Editor-in-Chief of the Springer journal Molecular Diversity in 2002 and held this position until his resignation in June 2007. He is the principal author of over 40 publications. Shu-Kun Lin has two children: a daughter Qian-Qian (Tina), born 26 July 1986, and a son, Di-Fan (Stefan), born 1 June 1996.