Henrique “Rico” Malvar became the managing director of the Microsoft Research Redmond lab in March 2007. Since the summer of 2004 Malvar had served as one of the directors of the lab. Before that he was a principal researcher in, and manager of, the Signal Processing Group. The group evolved into the current Communication and Collaboration Systems Knowledge Tools Group. Malvar’s own technical interests are in signal compression and enhancement, fast algorithms, multirate filter banks, and multiresolution transforms.

After earning his bachelor’s degree at the University of Brasilia and a master’s degree at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Malvar received a doctorate in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1986. He was a visiting professor at MIT for the 1986–87 academic year, and he was a member of the faculty of the Universidade de Brasília from 1979 to 1993. From 1993 to 1997 he was with PictureTel Corp. as vice president of Research and Advanced Development.

Malvar has served in many academic roles, including associate editorship of the journals IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing and Applied and Computational Harmonic Analysis, and member of the technical committee for the ICASSP and DCC conferences. He has been a member of the advisory committee for the Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering of the National Science Foundation, and is a member of the industry advisory committee for the IEEE Technical Activities Board.

Malvar was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. When he is not working with computers, he’s playing with them — usually taking them apart and experimenting with all kinds of new hardware and software components. He enjoys playing soccer (rarely), is tricked into hiking by his wife, and is a motor racing fan.