Krishna V. Palem is the Ken and Audrey Kennedy Professor of Computing at Rice University with appointments in Computer Science and in Electrical and Computer Engineering. He was the founding director of the Center for Research in Embedded Systems and Technology (CREST) at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Palem has been a leader in the area of Embedded Systems research, having founded one of the earliest laboratories for research in academia dedicated to this field in 1994—the Real-time Compilation Technologies and Instruction Level Parallelism (ReaCT-ILP) laboratory at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, NYU, where he was a tenured faculty member. Over the years, he has played an active role in enabling a community of research in embedded and hybrid systems internationally through invited and keynote lectures, conference organization (for example, co-founding the CASES workshop series and founding CASA), and participation as well as editorial contributions to journals (for example, ACM TECS).