James E. Tomayko is a teaching professor at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon, and a part-time senior member of the technical staff of the Software Engineering Institute (SEI). He is the director emeritus of the Master Software Engineering Program in SCS.

Previously, he was leader of the Academic Education Project at SEI. Prior to that, he founded the software engineering graduate program at Wichita State University. He has worked in industry through employee, contract, or consulting relationships with NCR, NASA, Boeing Defense and Space Group, CarnegieWorks, Xerox, the Westinghouse Energy Center, Keithley Instruments, and Mycro-Tek. He has given seminars and lectures on software fault tolerance, software development management, fly-by-wire, and software process improvement in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Spain, Great Britain, South Africa, Germany, China, and Colombia. Tomayko’s courses on managing software development and overviews of software engineering are among the most widely distributed courses in the SEI Academic Series.

Tomayko has had a parallel career in the history of technology, specializing in the history of computing in aerospace, and has written five books and several articles on spacecraft computer systems and software, concentrating primarily on NASA’s systems. Tomayko is on the editorial staff of the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing.

Note: This profile was published in April 2005. James Tomayko passed away in January 2006. We are grateful for his many contributions to CR over the years.