Thom Frühwirth is the designer of the programming language Constraint Handling Rules (CHR) and author of the book by the same name. He has also co-authored two leading textbooks on constraint programming and reasoning that became standard references for the research area. He has published about 180 research papers with more than 3800 citations. To date, he has given more than 80 invited talks and 80 contributed talks. He has been involved in more than 15 funded research projects. Thom Frühwirth is a long-time member of the PhD committee and the examination board for Computer Science, and of the examination board for Cognitive Systems at the University of Ulm.

Thom Frühwirth teaches and publishes since 30+ years. He obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science at the Technical University of Vienna in 1990, after visiting the State University of New York at Stony Brook with a one-year Fulbright grant and after an invitation to the Weizmann Institute of Science. Then he was a researcher at the European Computer Industry Research Centre in Munich. In 1996, he joined the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich. There he became assistant professor in 1998 and subsequently held visiting positions at the universities of Pisa, Monash Melbourne, PUC Rio de Janeiro, and at the CWI research center in Amsterdam. Since 2002 he has been professor at the University of Ulm, Germany