Congratulations to Emmanuel Candès for receiving the 2017 MacArthur Fellowship, better known as the “genius” grant, from The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation! Each of the recipients has been selected for having “shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction”. Candès (Stanford University) is known for developing a unified framework for addressing a range of problems in engineering and computer science, most notably compressed sensing. His work has laid the groundwork for improvements in many devices that make use of signal and image processing methods.

Candès has participated in IPAM’s programs as an organizer, core participant, and speaker since 2001. He was an organizer of the 2004 long program on compressed sensing, Multiscale Geometry and Analysis in High Dimensions. Around that time, Candès and UCLA’s Terry Tao developed some of the key ideas of compressed sensing. Since then, the concept of sparsity has become fundamental in data science. Candès is a member of IPAM’s Science Advisory Board and will be an organizer and core participant in IPAM’s upcoming long program, Science at Extreme Scales: Where Big Data Meets Large-Scale Computing.