Dr. Paul H. Siegel stands as a preeminent scholar in information theory and coding, currently serving as Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California San Diego. Holding an endowed chair at the Center for Memory and Recording Research, he has shaped the mathematical foundations of digital storage systems for decades. Dr. Siegel earned both his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1975 and 1979, followed by a Chaim Weizmann Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Courant Institute of New York University. After a fifteen-year tenure at IBM Research Division where he advanced to management positions including leadership of the Signal Processing and Coding project at Almaden Research Center, he joined the UCSD faculty in July 1995, bringing his industry expertise to academic research.
His pioneering research has revolutionized the mathematical frameworks underlying signal processing and coding, with particular emphasis on applications to digital data storage and wireless communications systems. Dr. Siegel's development of advanced coding techniques for digital recording systems earned him the 1992 IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award and the 1993 IEEE Communications Society Leonard G. Abraham Prize Paper Award, recognizing his transformative contributions to constrained channel coding and error-correction methods. His theoretical work on trellis-coded modulation and algebraic error-correction coding has established fundamental principles that significantly enhanced the efficiency and reliability of modern storage technologies. These innovations have directly influenced the design of high-density magnetic recording devices, solid-state non-volatile memories, and distributed data storage networks across the industry.
Beyond his research achievements, Dr. Siegel has demonstrated exceptional leadership through his service as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory from 2001 to 2004 and his role as Director of the Center for Memory and Recording Research from 2000 to 2011, where he fostered critical collaborations between academia and industry. His dedication to education has been recognized with the 2008 Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award for undergraduate teaching and the 2010 Best Teacher Award for graduate teaching in the ECE Department. As co-organizer of the annual UCSD Non-volatile Memories Workshop, he continues to shape the strategic direction of storage research while mentoring the next generation of engineers. Dr. Siegel remains at the forefront of advancing next-generation storage technologies through his ongoing research on coding and signal processing applications for emerging memory systems.
