Abbas El Gamal is the Hitachi America Professor in the School of Engineering at Stanford University. He received his B.Sc. with honors from Cairo University in 1972, and his M.S. in Statistics and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1977 and 1978, respectively. From 1978 to 1980, he was an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at USC. From 2003 to 2012, he was the Director of the Information Systems Laboratory at Stanford University. From 2012 to 2017, he was Chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. His research contributions have been in network information theory, FPGAs, digital imaging devices and systems, and smart grid modeling and control. He has authored or coauthored over 230 papers, and holds 35 patents in these areas. He is coauthor of the book, Network Information Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2011). He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of the IEEE. He has received several honors and awards for his research contributions, including the 2016 IEEE Richard Hamming Medal, the 2012 Claude E. Shannon Award, and the 2004 INFOCOM Paper Award. He served on the Board of Governors of the Information Theory Society from 2009 to 2016, and was President in 2014.