Michel Goemans is an Associate Professor of Applied Mathematics at MIT. He was born and raised in rainy Belgium, got his undergraduate education at the University of Louvain, and his Ph.D. at MIT. He has also been a Professor at the University of Louvain and an Adjunct Full Professor at the University of Waterloo. His research interests include all facets of combinatorial optimization. His past awards include the MPS Tucker prize, an Alfred P. Sloan research fellowship, an NSF CAREER award, and twice the SIAM Optimization prize. He is currently on the editorial boards of the SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics, the Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series B, and Mathematics of Operations Research.