To commemorate the achievements of Claude Elwood Shannon, an endowed lectureship has been established at the University of California, San Diego. Each year, an outstanding information theorist is selected to present the Shannon Memorial Lecture. We will provide short research vignettes that draw inspiration from Shannon’s ground-breaking impact on modern information and communication systems. These reflect a personal research journey and include (i) a functional duality between source coding and channel coding, that is particularly interesting in the presence of side-information; (ii) exchangeability between the compression and encryption modules in a secure and efficient system; (iii) an interesting connection between sampling theory and sparse-graph coding theory uncovered in the setting of multi-band sub-Nyquist sampling; and, time-permitting, (iv) fast sparse polynomial learning using the power of codes.