Emmanuel Candès is the Barnum-Simons Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, and a Professor of Electrical Engineering (by courtesy) at Stanford University. He received his PhD degree in Statistics from Stanford in 1998. His research interests are in computational harmonic analysis, statistics, information theory, signal processing and mathematical optimization. He has received several awards, including the 2006 Alan T. Waterman Award – the highest honor bestowed by the National Science Foundation. He has given over 50 plenary lectures at major international conferences.