Alejandro Lopez-Ortiz received his B.Math. degree from the National University of Mexico (UNAM) in 1989, and his M.Math. and Ph.D. from the University of Waterloo (Canada) in 1990 and 1996, respectively. In his research, he combines the development of theoretical tools and efficient algorithms with real-life applications. He has been a faculty member in the School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo since 2001 (promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2004, and full professor in 2012). Previously, he was the director of research at Internap, a network services corporation, in Seattle. His research addresses questions in areas such as scheduling, search engines, data streams, and caching. He has served as chair of various conferences and workshops.