Henrique Malvar is the Chief Scientist of Microsoft Research. At MSR we drive technological advances in computer science and engineering and related areas. Many of our projects involve collaborations among our worldwide labs. We work closely with Microsoft's business groups to realize those advances as compelling innovations to existing and new Microsoft products and services. Before taking on the Chief Scientist role, Rico was the Managing Director of Microsoft Research Redmond, and before that he was a principal researcher in and founder of the Signal Processing group.

Rico is a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer. He is an Affiliate Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Washington, and a member of advisory boards at MIT, UW, and USC. He is a member of the advisory board for the IEEE Future Directions Committee, and was a former member of the advisory committee for the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate at the National Science Foundation. He is a member of the editorial board of the journal Applied and Computational Harmonic Analysis (ACHA) and is a past associate editor of the journal IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing.

Before coming to Microsoft in 1997, Rico was Vice President of Research and Advanced Technology at PictureTel (later acquired by Polycom). Prior to that, he headed the Digital Signal Processing research group at Universidade de Brasília, Brazil. He received a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT, under Prof. David Staelin, in 1986. He is the author or co-author of over 100 issued patents and over 150 technical articles in journals, conferences, technical reports, and standards contributions. Rico is a "carioca", which means he was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Rico's technical contributions include the development of lapped transforms (used in multimedia formats, Internet telephony, DSL modems, and other applications), and Malvar wavelets (a class of local trigonometric transforms, also known as Malvar-Wilson bases or Malvar-Coifman-Meyer wavelets). At Microsoft his contributions include co-development of the Windows Media Audio digital audio format, image and data compression technologies for Microsoft Windows, Office, Hyper-V, Tablet PC, Bing Maps, and Xbox 360, rights management technologies for Windows Media, new video transformation and quantization and new color transformation techniques that were adopted into H.264 (the new video format for digital TV and Internet video), and acoustic signal processing technologies for Windows, Windows Messenger, Office Communicator, and Xbox 360 Kinect. Rico's PTC image codec was the basis for the development of the new Microsoft HD Photo format for digital pictures, which has been adopted as the new JPEG XR standard by the ISO and the ITU-T. His technical interests include signal enhancement and compression, especially of audio and images, multirate signal processing, signal decompositions (filter banks, transforms, wavelets), fast algorithms, coding theory, and electronic circuits and hardware.