Tomasz Kowaltowski is a Professor of Computing (retired) at the University of Campinas (Campinas, State of São Paulo, Brazil). He was born in the former Soviet Union in 1942, lived in Poland from 1946 to 1958 and then emigrated to Brazil where he got his high school education and an undergraduate degree in Electronic Engineering from the University of São Paulo Polytechnical School in 1966.  He wrote his first computer programs in 1962 for the University of São Paulo  Computer Center IBM 1620.  He received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1973 and was an assistant professor at the University of São Paulo until 1977. Since then he has been with the University of Campinas. He was a visiting associate professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara (1980) and at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta (1985/86). His main interests are design and implementation of programming languages, data structures and algorithms for natural language processing and education in computing. He has authored and coauthored three books in Portuguese and published papers in Journal of the ACM, Acta Informatica, Software - Practice and Experience, Information Processing Letters, Revista Brasileira de Computação, Computer Languages, Journal of the Brazilian Computer Society. He has worked on several software development projects with Brazilian companies. From 1996 to 2001 he was the first Director of the Institute of Computing (former Department of Computer Science) of the University of Campinas. He retired from the University in 2002, but continues as a voluntary faculty member and as a consultant to some software companies.