Peter Welch graduated in Mathematics from Warwick University in 1969, taking his Ph.D in Computer Science from the same institution in 1974. His doctoral research was on semantic models for the lambda-calculus, one of the key mathematical theories supporting functional programming. Frustrated by the slow progress towards usable performance from functional programming implementations, he converted' to parallel processing in the early '80s. Discovering occam in 1983, he was impressed to find an imperative language that was as secure and elegant as traditional functional languages and could be implemented very efficiently with current levels of technology. Since then, he has researched into a range of system design methods and tools for parallel processing, testing these against application areas such as real-time control, vision processing, networking and biological/physical system modelling. He is currently leading the UK-funded occam-for-all project, which has ported occam to a variety of modern parallel architectures and is developing the language to support (virtual) shared memory multiprocessors whilst retaining its simplicity, security and efficiency. JavaPP, the CSP binding to Java, is a direct spin-off from this work. He was appointed Professor of Parallel Computing at the University of Kent (England) in 1989 and is currently Chairman of the World occam and/or Transputer User Group (WoTUG). Details of recent research grants and publications may be found at <URL:http://www.cs.ukc.ac.uk/research/par/>.