Javier Esparza holds the Chair for Foundations of Software Reliability and Theoretical Computer Science at the Technische Universität München since 2007. Previously he held the Chair of Software Reliability and Security at the University of Stuttgart (2003-2007) and the Chair of Theoretical Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh (2001-2003), and worked as Associate Professor at the Technische Universität München (1994-2001). He has co-authored a book on Free Choice Petri nets with Jörg Desel, and a book on the unfolding approach to Model Checking with Keijo Heljanko. He has published about 100 scientific papers. He has made contributions to automatic verification and to concurrency theory. In particular, he has contributed to the theory of Free Choice Petri nets, and was one of the initiators of the unfolding approach to model checking and of the automata-theoretic approach to software model checking. In the last years he has also conducted research on algorithms for the verification of infinite-state stochastic systems. His group has developed several verification tools, including Moped and jMoped and The Model-Checking Kit, and has contributed to the development of PEP.