Olivier Lecarme obtained his MS and PhD degrees from the University of Grenoble (France) in 1965 and 1970, respectively. He has held successive academic positions during his 45-year career at the following universities: the University of Grenoble (six years); the University of Montréal (Canada) (five years); the University of Lausanne (Switzerland) (two years); and the University of Nice (32 years). He retired in September 2008, and is now a Professor Emeritus.

He has taught numerous computer science courses to various audiences, including undergraduate and graduate computer science majors, undergraduates studying the technology of communication, and professionals. His main teaching interests are higher-level programming languages, compilation, algorithmics and data structures, the methodology of programming, computer graphics, and operating systems. He has supervised about 30 PhD theses, mainly in the area of programming language definition and implementation. His contributions to two major programming languages, Pascal and Ada, are acknowledged in the official definition documents.

He is presently preparing a book about GIMP, both in English and French. He devotes part of his time to helping novices learn to use their computers correctly, and is a fervent proponent of open-source software. To date, he has authored 70 reviews for Computing Reviews.