Dr. Hans P. Zima is a Principal Scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, and a Professor Emeritus of the University of Vienna, Austria. He received his Ph.D.  degree in Mathematics and Astronomy from the University of Vienna in 1964.

His major research interests have been in the fields of high-level programming languages, compilers, and advanced software tools.  In the early 1970s, while working in industry, he designed and implemented one of the first high-level real-time languages for the German Air Traffic Control Agency.  During his tenure as a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Bonn, Germany, he contributed to the German supercomputer project "SUPRENUM", leading the design of the first Fortran-based compilation system for distributed-memory architectures (1989).  After his move to the University of Vienna, he became the chief designer of the Vienna Fortran language (1992) that provided a major input for the High Performance Fortran de-facto standard.  From 1997 to 2007, Dr. Zima headed the Priority Research Program "Aurora", a ten-year program funded by the Austrian Science Foundation.  His research over the past years focused on the design of the "Chapel" programming language in the framework of the DARPA-sponsored HPCS project "Cascade".

More recently, Dr. Zima has become involved in the design of space-borne fault-tolerant high capability computing systems.

Dr.  Zima is the author or co-author of about 200 publications, including 4 books.