Thomas Kailath (S'57-M'62-F'70) was born in Poona, India, on June 7, 1935. He received the B.E. degree in telecommunications engineering from the University of Poona in 1956, and the S.M. and Sc.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, in 1959 and 1961, respectively.During 1961-1962, he worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratories, Pasadena, CA, and also taught part time at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. From 1963 to 1968, he was an Associate Professor and from 1968, Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, Stanford, CA. He was Director of the Information Systems Laboratory from 1971 through 1980, and is presently Associate Chairman of the Department of Electrical Engineering. He has held shorter term appointments at several institutions around the world, including a Ford Fellowship in 1963 at the University of California, Berkeley; a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1970 at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India; a Churchill Fellowship in 1977 at the Statistical Laboratory, Cambridge University, England; and an Erna and Jakob Michael Fellowship in 1984 at the Department of Theoretical Mathematics of The Weizmann Institute, Rehovot, Israel. His research has involved a number of mathematical techniques and a variety of applications in statistical communications, control, information theory, linear systems, and signal processing. He is the author of Linear Systems (Prentice-Hall, 1980), and Lectures on Wiener and Kalman Filtering (Springer-Verlag, 1981); Editor of Benchmark Papers in Linear Least-Squares Estimation (Academic Press, 1977), and Modern Signal Processing (Hemisphere-Springer-Verlag, 1985); and Coeditor of VLSI and Modern Signal Processing (Prentice-Hall, 1985).
Dr. Kailath has received outstanding paper prizes from the IEEE Information Theory Group .and the IEEE Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing Society, and the American Automatic Control Council Education Award. He is on the editorial board of several engineering and mathematics journals, including the International Journal of Control, Systems and Control Letters, Linear Algebra and its Applications, Integral Equations and Operator Theory, and others. He has been, since 1963, the Editor of the Prentice-Hall Series on Information and System Sciences. He was on the IEEE Press Board for several years. From 1971 to 1978, he was a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Professional Group on Information Theory and the IEEE Control Systems Society. During 1975 he served as President of the Information Theory Group. He is also a member of the National Academy-of Engineering, a Life Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, England, and a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He is a member of the American Mathematical Society, the Mathematical Association of America, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, the Society of Exploration Geophysicists, and several other scientific organizations.