Riccardo Poli is a professor in the Department of Computing and Electronic Systems at the University of Essex, Colchester, UK. His main research interests include genetic programming, particle swarm optimization, the theory of evolutionary algorithms, and biomedical engineering. He has published more than 300 refereed papers on evolutionary algorithms, biomedical engineering, neural networks, and image/signal processing. He was a co-founder of the Essex BCI-NE group in 2004. He co-authored the books Foundations of Genetic Programming (Springer, 2002) and A Field Guide to Genetic Programming (Lulu, 2008). He has been chair of numerous international conferences. He is an associate editor of the Evolutionary Computation journal, the Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines journal, and the International Journal of Computational Intelligence Research, an advisory board member for the Journal of Artificial Evolution and Applications, and a member of the editorial board of Swarm Intelligence. He is one of the founding members of the Brain-Computer Interfaces Group at the University of Essex. He is a Senior Fellow of The International Society for Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (now ACM SIGEVO) and a recipient of the Evo* award for outstanding contributions to the field of evolutionary computation.