Umberto Ravaioli received a Laurea in Electronics Engineering in 1980 and a Laurea in Physics in 1982, both from the University of Bologna, and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 1986 from Arizona State University. He is a Professor in the University of Illinois Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His research interests are in computational electronics, with emphasis on Monte Carlo methods for device simulation, transport in quantum nanostructures, simulation of conduction phenomena in biological ionic channels, properties of carbon nanotubes, and supercomputation.