“Nilesh was born in the beautiful, cosmopolitan city of Bombay (now Mumbai), India. Wanderlust (and a scholarship) led him to München where, in addition to sampling the pleasures of the Bavarian Alps and German delicacies, he obtained a Master’s in Communications Engineering. He then followed his degree collecting spree to acquire a Dr.-Ing. from the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. A post-doc enticed him to the quaint city of Leuven, where he happily remains to this day. After his post-doc he worked at NXP Semiconductors (Leuven) in the Mobile Audio Systems division. He held several roles here, from senior engineer to principal researcher to resident genius (unfortunately, not an official designation). At some point, being convinced that he was good at explaining his stuff to the layman, he decided to move back to academia. Happily, he found a suitable opening within the Faculty of Engineering and Architecture at Ghent University, where he is now a tenured faculty member. His studies and research over the years have inculcated and reinforced a love of signal processing. He believes this is a fantastic field and is driven to convince hapless students of the same. His work has been focussed in the domain of audio and speech signal detection, analysis and enhancement, and his modest contributions may be found under the bonnet of several contemporary smart, mobile devices. With the steady establishment of his group, he is now extending his technical repertoire and developing technologies around signal processing and machine learning that would be of help to society. He has several papers and patents to his name but values, most of all, that internal pleasure and satisfaction that comes from understanding or building something new.”