Alexander Reinefeld, born in 1957, is the department head of Computer Science at Zuse Institute Berlin (www.zib.de) and professor for Parallel and Distributed Systems at the Humboldt University Berlin. He received his diploma in computer science (M.Sc.) in 1982 and his Ph.D. in 1987, both from the University of Hamburg. In 1984, he was awarded a Ph.D. scholarship by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) for a year abroad at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and in 1987 he received a Sir Izaak Walton Killam Post Doctoral Fellowship for a two-year research stay at the same university. After having worked as a freelance software consultant for distributed database systems he became Assistant Professor at the University of Hamburg in 1989. In 1992 he became Managing Director of the Paderborn Center for Parallel Computing, which he established as a competence center for massively parallel computing in Germany. In 1998 he changed to Berlin to found the Computer Science Department at Zuse Institute and to become a professor at the Humboldt University.

Alexander Reinefeld is a co-founder of the Northern German Supercomputing Alliance (www.hlrn.de), a consortium of six German states that jointly fund and operate large supercomputers (currently a 300 TeraFlop/s computer from SGI) for the benefit of the researchers and scientists in Germany. In 2002 he received an IBM Faculty Award on Grid Computing. He co-founded the European Grid Forum, the Global Grid Forum and the German e-Science initiative D-Grid. He serves as an advisor at the national and international level, e.g. for the 7th EU Framework Program, the IBM autonomic computing board, the Open Grid Forum, the EU Next Generation Grid expert group, the Alberta Cyberinfrastructure for Innovation (Cybera), and the Paderborn Center for Parallel Computing. He organized international conferences (IEEE/ACM CCGrid 2002, Global Grid Forum 2004, multiple Dagstuhl seminars), participates in editorial boards (FGCS, JoGC, IJGUC) and many program committees. His research interest is in scalable and dependable computing, distributed data management, high-performance computer architecture, and peer-to-peer algorithms. He published numerous scientific papers and holds two patents on scalable distributed data management. He is a member of ACM, IEEE, and GI.