VONTOBEL Pascal Olivier
Chairman And Graduate Division Head
Pascal O. Vontobel received the Diploma degree in electrical engineering in 1997, the Post-Diploma degree in information techniques in 2002, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering in 2003, all from ETH Zurich, Switzerland.
From 1997 to 2002 he was a research and teaching assistant at the Signal and Information Processing Laboratory at ETH Zurich, from 2006 to 2013 he was a research scientist with the Information Theory Research Group at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto, CA, USA, and since 2014 he has been with the Department of Information Engineering at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where, since 2023, he has been a (full) professor, department chairman, and graduate division head. Besides this, he was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2002-2004), a visiting assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (2004-2005), a postdoctoral research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2006), and a visiting scholar at Stanford University (2014). His research interests lie in coding and information theory, quantum information processing, data science, communications, and signal processing.
Dr. Vontobel was an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (2009-2012), an Awards Committee Member of the IEEE Information Theory Society (2013-2014), a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Information Theory Society (2014-2015), an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Communications (2014-2017), and currently is a Thomas Cover Dissertation Awards Committee Member of the IEEE Information Theory Society (2023-2025). Moreover, he was a TPC co-chair of the 2016 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, the 2018 IEICE International Symposium on Information Theory and its Applications, and the 2018 IEEE Information Theory Workshop, along with being the director of the 2021 and 2023 Croucher Summer Course in Information Theory, co-organizing several topical workshops, and being on the technical program committees of many international conferences. Furthermore, he was multiple times a plenary speaker at international information and coding theory conferences, he received an exemplary reviewer award from the IEEE Communications Society, and was awarded the ETH medal for his Ph.D. dissertation. He is an IEEE Fellow.