Rico Malvar

Henrique (Rico) Malvar leads the Microsoft Research Enable group, which aims to empower people living with disabilities. Previously, Rico’s roles were  Chief Scientist for Microsoft Research, Managing Director of Microsoft Research Redmond, and Partner Researcher and founder and manager of the Communications, Collaboration, and Signal Processing group at Microsoft Research.

Rico is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, and a recipient of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award.

Before coming to Microsoft in 1997, Rico was Vice President of Research and Advanced Technology at PictureTel (later acquired by Polycom). Prior to that, he headed the Digital Signal Processing research group at Universidade de Brasília, Brazil.  He received a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT, under the advice of Prof. David Staelin, in 1986, a M.Sc. in electrical engineering from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (COPPE-UFRJ) in 1979, under Prof. Luiz P. Calôba, and a B.S. in electrical engineering from the Universidade de Brasília in 1977, working with Prof. Carlos Lisboa. He is the inventor or co-inventor of over 120 issued U.S. patents and over 170 technical articles in journals, conferences, technical reports, and standards contributions.

Rico is a “carioca”, which means he was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.