Narayana Santhanam has been an Assistant Professor at the University of Hawaii since 2009. He obtained his BTech from the Indian Institute of Technology, Chennai (then Madras) in 2000, and MS and PhD from the University of California, San Diego in 2003 and 2006 respectively. From 2007 to 2008, he held a postdoctoral position at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests lie in the intersection of information theory and statistics, with a focus on the undersampled/high dimensional regime and including applications to finance, biology, communication and estimation theory. He is the recipient of the 2006 Information Theory Best Paper award from the IEEE Information Theory Society along with A. Orlitsky and J. Zhang. He has co-organized several workshops on high dimensional statistics and "big data" problems over the last five years, and is a member of the NSF Center for Science of Information (CSoI), an NSF Science and Technology center.