Kai Simons is a Finnish professor of biochemistry and cell biology and physician, living and working in Germany.

[1] He worked with other students to organize a campaign to fight taeniasis, a disease common in eastern Finland where eating raw fish is popular.

[2] After completing his MD in 1964, he began a postdoctoral fellowship at Rockefeller University in New York City, where he worked between 1966 and 1967 on blood serum protein polymorphism.

After a one-month stay in MRC Laboratory for Molecular Biology in Cambridge, the group started investigating a Semliki Forest virus, introduced to Simons by Kääriäinen.

[6] He was one of the initiators of establishing and building Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden (Germany), where he moved.

[1][12][13][14][15] During this period, Simons also investigated the application of detergents in biochemistry with a special attention to their role in biological membrane research.

[5][1] In his works from 1988, together with Gerit van Meer,[19][20] Simons proposed the existence of lipid microdomains in cell membranes for the first time.

Considering his work from years 1996–2007 tracked until May 2009, Simons was 12. in the list of the most frequently cited scientists in the field cell biology with 90 articles and 16,299 citations.