Alasdair Rawsthorne was awarded a B.Sc. degree in Electronic Engineering from the University of Southampton in 1974. After a period working in industry, designing hardware and microcode for the ICL 2900 series of mainframes, he presently lectures at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester.

During a period of secondment to ACRI in France, during 1991/92, he co-wrote (with Peter Bird) the definitive architecture definition for the project.

His current research interests include hardware and software architectures for parallel computer systems and binary translation systems.