Ruediger L. Urbanke obtained his Dipl. Ing. degree from the Vienna University of Technology in 1990, and MSc and PhD in Electrical Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis in 1992 and 1995, respectively. He held a position at the Mathematics of Communications Department at Bell Labs from 1995 till 1999 before becoming a faculty member at the School of Computer & Communication Sciences (I&C) of EPFL. He is principally interested in the analysis and design of modern coding schemes, graphical models, and the application of methods from statistical physics to problems in communications. From 2000 to 2004 he was an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. From 2009 till 2012 he was the head of the I&C Doctoral School and in 2013 he served as a Dean of I&C. He is a recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship. He is a co-author of the book Modern Coding Theory, published by Cambridge University Press, a co-recipient of the 2002 and the 2013 IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award, and recipient of the 2011 IEEE Koji Kobayashi Award, as well as the 2014 IEEE Hamming Medal.