Doug Stinson is a distinguished scholar and educator in the fields of combinatorics and cryptography, with a career defined by pioneering research, exemplary teaching, and dedicated service to the academic community. He is Professor emeritus at the University of Waterloo’s David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science and holds adjunct appointments at the Cheriton School and Carleton’s School of Mathematics and Statistics. His achievements have been recognized through numerous awards. As a graduate student at the University of Waterloo he received the Alumni PhD Gold Medal in 1981 awarded for the best PhD dissertation at the University each year. He became a Founding Fellow of the Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications (ICA) in 1990. The ICA is an international scientific organization formed to increase the visibility and influence of the combinatorial community. He subsequently received their Hall Medal in 1994 which recognizes his extensive, high-quality midcareer research with substantial international impact and their Stanton Medal in 2022 to honour his significant lifetime contributions to promoting the discipline of combinatorics through advocacy, outreach, service, teaching and/or mentoring. He has held several esteemed professorships, including the NSERC/Certicom Industrial Research Chair in Cryptography, and was appointed University Research Chair at the University of Waterloo – a title conferred on a maximum of five faculty members across the university each year. In recognition of his distinguished contributions, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2011 and was named a University Professor in 2013, a title held by only 19 active professors at Waterloo and 16 retired ones. His influence on the combinatorics and cryptography community is exemplified by the Fields Institute in Toronto holding a conference, Stinson66, in honor of his 66th birthday with presentations by leading scholars from around the world. Doug Stinson’s research is in combinatorial cryptography, in which mathematical structures are used to construct systems to communicate unconditionally securely. The phrase “unconditionally secure” means that the systems cannot be broken, even with infinite computational resources, and therefore they would remain secure regardless of any computational or algorithmic advances that take place, including the construction of practical quantum computers. It essentially removes the need for any unproven assumption in the design of cryptography. Stinson has made foundational contributions to this area. His research career has been tremendously productive and impactful, with more than 400 publications in leading books, journals, and conferences, which have garnered almost 30,000 citations and an h-index of 75, according to Google Scholar. Many of his contributions considered seminal within their fields. His research has had a significant impact on the practical aspects of computing, as evidenced by applications in everyday technology, including the BluRay copyright system and the random number generator in the iPhone (despite the lack of formal attribution). He has made invaluable contributions to the combinatorics and cryptography communities through his extensive service. He served as president of the ICA from 2016 to 2022, held numerous editorial roles, and chaired CRYPTO 1993, the field’s premier conference. His commitment to teaching and mentorship has been exemplary: he has supervised 12 postdoctoral fellows, 17 PhD students, and 16 master’s students, many of whom have pursued successful academic careers. His textbook “Cryptography Theory and Practice”, published by CRC Press and now in its fourth edition, has been the most widely used and influential graduate-level cryptography textbook worldwide since its initial publication in 1995.