Les Atlas received a Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1984. He joined the University of Washington in 1984, where he is a Professor of electrical engineering.His research is in digital signal processing, with specializations in acoustic analysis, time-frequency representations, and signal recognition and coding. His research is supported by DARPA, the Office of Naval Research, the Army Research Lab, and the Washington Research Foundation. Dr. Atlas received a National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award and a Fulbright Research Award. He was General Chair of the 1998 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, Chair of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Committee on Theory and Methods, and a member of the Signal Processing Society's Board of Governors.