Nikhil Bansal is a researcher at CWI, Amsterdam and a professor in the department of Math and CS at Eindhoven University of Technology. He obtained his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University (2003), and worked at the IBM T.J. Watson Research, New york until 2011, where he also managed the Algorithms group. He is broadly interested in theoretical computer science with focus on the design and analysis of algorithms. He also works in related areas such as discrete mathematics, machine learning, combinatorial optimization and complexity. He has received several best paper awards for his work, including one at the FOCS 2011 conference. He is a recipient of NWO Vidi, TOP, VICI, Groot grants and an ERC consolidator grant. Currently, he is on the editorial boards of Journal of the ACM and Theory of Computing.