Luiz Capretz is an IEEE Senior Member, and has over 20 years of experience in the software engineering field as a practitioner, manager and educator. Before joining the University of Western Ontario, in Canada, he worked at both technical and managerial levels, taught and did research on the engineering of software in Brazil, Argentina, England and Japan since 1981.He was the Director of Informatics and Coordinator of the computer science program in two universities (UMC and COC) in the State of Sao Paulo/Brazil.

He has authored and co-authored over 50 peer-reviewed research papers on the engineering of software in leading international journals and conference proceedings, and co-authored a book: Object-Oriented Software: Design an Maintenance, published by World Scientific. Currently he is focusing his research interests and projects into software estimation, human factors in software engineering, software product lines, and software engineering education.

Dr. Capretz received his Ph.D. from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne (U.K.), M.Sc. from the National Institute for Space Research (INPE-Brazil), and B.Sc. from UNICAMP (Brazil). He plays soccer as a hobby.

When asked why he joined the IEEE, he replied "IEEE publications are among the best in the software engineering field. Being a member, I have access to invaluable technical material as well as worldwide job openings; on three occasions I was offered jobs from positions advertised in IEEE magazines. Also, I became the IEEE student counselor in the University of Western Ontario (Canada), and encouraged electrical, computer, and software engineering students to be part of IEEE."