José A.B. Fortes received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering (Licenciatura em Engenharia Electrotécnica) from the Universidade de Angola in 1978, the M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Colorado State University, Fort Collins in 1981 and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles in 1984. From 1984 until 2001 he was on the faculty of the School of Electrical Engineering of Purdue University at West Lafayette, Indiana. In 2001 he joined both the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering of the University of Florida as Professor and BellSouth Eminent Scholar. From July 1989 through July 1990 he served at the National Science Foundation as director of the Microelectronics Systems Architecture program. From June 1993 till January 1994 he was a Visiting Professor at the Computer Architecture Department of the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya in Barcelona, Spain.
His research interests are in the areas of parallel processing, computer architecture, network-computing and fault-tolerant computing. He has authored or coauthored over 100 technical papers. His research has been funded by the Office of Naval Research, AT&T Foundation, IBM, General Electric and the National Science Foundation.
José Fortes is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) professional society. He was a Distinguished Visitor of the IEEE Computer Society from 1991 till 1995. José Fortes is on the Editorial Boards of Cluster Computing: The Journal of Networks, Software Tools and Applications, the International Journal on Parallel Programming and the Journal of VLSI Signal Processing. He is also a past member of the Editorial Boards of IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems and the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing.