Emmanuel Candès is the Barnum-Simons Chair in Mathematics and Statistics at Stanford University, and Professor of Electrical Engineering (by courtesy). His research interests lie at the interface of statistics, information theory, signal processing and computational mathematics. He received his Ph.D. in statistics from Stanford in 1998. Candès has received several awards including the Alan T. Waterman Award from NSF, which is the highest honor bestowed by NSF to early-career scientists, and the MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as the ‘genius award’. He has given over 100 plenary lectures at major international conferences, not only in mathematics and statistics but in many other areas as well including biomedical imaging and solid-state physics. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014. He received the 2020 Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research, the same year as one of his heroes, Ennio Morricone.