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), 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 over 100 scientific papers in the fields of automatic program verification, program analysis, concurrency theory, and automata theory. Javier Esparza has contributed to the theory 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. More recently he has conducted research on the fundamentals of program analysis and the verification of infinite-state stochastic systems. His group has developed several verification tools, including Moped and jMoped and The Model-Checking Kit, and participated in the development of PEP. He received a honorary doctorate in Informatics from the Masaryk University of Brno in 2009 and is member of Academia Europaea.