Richard G. Baraniuk grew up in Winnipeg, Canada, the coldest city in the world with a population of over 600,000.  He received the B.Sc. degree in 1987 from the University of Manitoba, the M.Sc. degree in 1988 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the Ph.D. degree in 1992 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, all in Electrical Engineering. In 1986, he was a research engineer with Omron Tateisi Electronics in Kyoto, Japan. While at the University of Illinois, he held a joint appointment with the CERL Sound Group and the Coordinated Science Laboratory. After spending 1992-1993 at Ecole Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France, he joined Rice University in Houston, Texas, where he is currently theC. Sidney Burrus Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and a sporadic DJ for KTRU. He spent a sabbatical at Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Télécommunications in Paris in 2001 and Ecole Fédérale Polytechnique de Lausanne in Switzerland in 2002.