Professor Petre Stoica is a world-renowned scholar whose pioneering work has fundamentally shaped the field of statistical signal processing over several decades. He currently serves as a Full Professor of Signals and Systems Modeling in the Department of Information Technology at Uppsala University in Sweden, where he has established one of Europe's leading research groups in array processing and system identification. Born in Râmnicu Vâlcea, Romania in 1949, he completed his secondary education in his native city before pursuing higher studies at the Politehnica University of Bucharest, where he earned his engineering degree from 1967 to 1972 and subsequently obtained his Doctor of Engineering in automatic control in 1979. His distinguished academic career has been recognized through membership in multiple prestigious academies including the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, the United States National Academy of Engineering as an International Member, and the Romanian Academy as an Honorary Member.
Professor Stoica's groundbreaking contributions have transformed radar and sonar systems, wireless communications, and biomedical applications through innovative mathematical frameworks and practical algorithms that address fundamental challenges in parameter estimation and signal analysis. His development of the SPICE (Sparse Covariance-Based Estimation) method for array processing has become a cornerstone technique in direction-of-arrival estimation and spectral analysis, widely adopted in both academic research and industrial applications worldwide. With an impressive citation count exceeding 86,000 and an h-index of 126 according to Google Scholar, his research has established new paradigms for handling sparse signals, covariance matrix estimation, and robust parameter identification in noisy environments. His seminal papers on maximum likelihood estimation, array signal processing, and waveform design have received multiple best paper awards including the IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award in 2013 and the Sustained Impact Paper Award in 2022, demonstrating the enduring significance of his theoretical contributions.
Beyond his technical achievements, Professor Stoica has been instrumental in cultivating the global signal processing community through extensive mentorship, editorial leadership, and professional society engagement over his long and distinguished career. He has served in editorial roles for numerous prestigious journals and has trained generations of researchers who now hold prominent positions across academia and industry worldwide. His sustained excellence was recognized with the IEEE Fourier Award for Signal Processing in 2018, the highest honor in the field, cementing his legacy as one of the most influential figures in modern signal processing. Currently active with publications appearing as recently as 2025 on robust direction-of-arrival estimation and low-rank covariance matrix estimation, Professor Stoica continues to advance the theoretical foundations and practical applications of signal processing with the same rigor and innovation that has characterized his entire career.
