Pierre Kuonen was born in Switzerland in 1958. He obtained a Master degree in electrical engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in 1982. From April 1982 to June 1983 he worked as Field Engineer with Schlumberger Overseas S.A. in Africa in the petroleum industry. From October 1983 to December 1987 he was Engineer at the R&D department of the company Charmilles Technologies S.A. He joined the Computer Science Theory Laboratory of EPFL in 1988 and obtained a Ph.D degree in computer science in 1993. Since 1988 he steadily worked in the field of parallel and distributed high performance computing. First at EPFL where he founded and managed the Parallel Computing Research Group (GRIP) then at the University of Applied Science of Valais. During this period he was strongly involved in several European projects (STORMS, EuroTOPS-RiskPro, Monasidre, ForAllWear). Since 2002 he is full professor at the University of Applied Science of Western Switzerland, Fribourg where he is leading the GRID and Ubiquitous Computing Group. He is partners of the CoreGRID European Network of Excellence. His main interests are in parallel and distributed programming (models and algorithms), and middleware for GRID systems.