Colin Atkinson has been the leader of the Software Engineering Group at the University of Mannheim since April 2003. Before that he held a joint position as a professor at the University of Kaiserslautern and project leader at the affiliated Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering. From 1991 until 1997 he was an Assistant Professor of Software Engineering at the University of Houston – Clear Lake. His research interests are focused on the use of model-driven and component based approaches in the development of dependable computing systems. He received a Ph.D. and M.Sc. in computer science from Imperial College, London, in 1990 and 1985 respectively, and received his B.Sc. in Mathematical Physics from the University of Nottingham 1983.