Eric Rains is Professor of Mathematics (Emeritus) at Caltech. His research work covers a wide variety of research fields, spanning from quantum information theory and coding theory, to the theory of random matrices, the study of special functions, non-commutative geometry and number theory (among others). Professor Rains most notable contribution to quantum information theory is the so-called "additive" construction with Calderbank, Shor, Sloane. In their work, they construct binary quantum codes from combinatorial data, producing much stronger codes than previously known. In recent work joint with Poonen, he developed a model for the distribution of p-Selmer groups of elliptic curves, which has since been generalized by others to pl-Selmer groups and to the p-adic part of Tate-Shafarevich groups.