Short bio:

João Barros received his undergraduate education in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Universidade do Porto (UP), Portugal and Universitaet Karlsruhe, Germany, until 1999, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology from the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM), Germany, in 2004. After his doctoral research on network information theory and joint source and channel coding, João Barros joined the faculty of the Department of Computer Science at the Universidade do Porto, where he founded the Networking and Information Processing Group at the Instituto de Telecomunicações. The focus of his research lies in the general areas of information theory, communication networks and data security. In 2003, Dr. Barros received a Best Teaching Award from the Bavarian State Ministry of Sciences, Research and the Arts. He received scholarships from several institutions, including the Fulbright Commission and the Luso-American Foundation for Development, and has held a visiting position at Cornell University. He is currently on sabbatical at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. João Barros has served on several Technical Program Committees, including WiOpt 2008, ISIT 2007, IS 2007, Globecom 2007 and 2008, and SSI 2006. He is also one of the communications panelists evaluating research proposals submitted to the US National Science Foundation. Since July 2006, he serves as Secretary of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society.