Henry Pfister

Henry D. Pfister received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 2003 from the University of California, San Diego and is currently the Addy Family Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University with a secondary appointment in Mathematics. Prior to joining Duke, he was an associate professor at Texas A&M University (2006-2014), a post-doctoral fellow at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (2005-2006), and a senior engineer at Qualcomm Corporate R&D in San Diego (2003-2004). His current research interests include information theory, error-correcting codes, quantum computing, and machine learning.

He received the NSF Career Award in 2008 and a Texas A&M ECE Department Outstanding Professor Award in 2010. He is a coauthor of the 2007 IEEE COMSOC best paper in Signal Processing and Coding for Data Storage, a coauthor of a 2016 Symposium on the Theory of Computing (STOC) best paper, and a corecipient of the Information Theory Society Paper Award in both 2021 and 2025. He has served the IEEE Information Theory Society as a member of the Board of Governors (2019-2023), an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (2013-2016), and a Distinguished Lecturer (2015-2016). He was the General Chair of the 2016 North American School of Information Theory and a Technical Program Committee Co-Chair of the 2021 International Symposium on Information Theory.