Andris Ambainis received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2001, supervised by Umesh Vazirani. After that, he was a postdoc at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton and at the University of California, Berkeley, and a faculty member at the University of Waterloo, Canada. In 2007, Andris returned to his native Latvia and became Professor at the University of Latvia. His research interests include many areas of quantum computing and quantum information theory (quantum algorithms, quantum complexity theory, quantum cryptography, pseudorandom quantum states, etc.), as well as the classical theory of computation.