Thomas Kailath received a B.E. (Telecom) degree from Poona University in June 1956, and graduate degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (S.M., June 1959, Sc.D., June 1961). He has also received honorary doctorates from Linkoping University,Sweden, in 1990, Strathclyde University ,Scotland, in 1992, the University of Carlos III, Madrid ,Spain, in 1999 and the University of Bordeaux I in 2003. From October 1961 to December 1962, he worked in the Communications Research division of the Jet Propulsion Laboratories, Pasadena, CA, and also taught part-time at the California Institute of Technology. He was appointed Acting Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University in Jan. 1963, Associate Professor in Sep.1964, and Professor in September 1968. He served as Director of the Information Systems Laboratory from 1971 through 1980, as Associate Department Chair from 1981 to 1987, and was then appointed the first holder of the Hitachi America Professorship in Engineering. He assumed Emeritus status in June 2001, but has been recalled to active duty to continue his research and writing activities.

Professor Kailath has also held short-term appointments at several institutions around the world, including Bell Labs, UC Berkeley, UCLA, Cambridge University, K.U. Leuven, T.U.Delft, the Indian Institute of Science, the Indian Statistical Institute, Imperial College, the Weizmann Institute, T.U.Munich and M.I.T. Professor Kailath's research has spanned a large number of disciplines, emphasizing information theory and communications in the sixties, linear systems, estimation and control in the seventies, VLSI design and sensor array signal processing in the eighties, and applications to semiconductor manufacturing and digital communications in the nineties. Concurrently, he contributed to several fields of mathematics, especially stochastic processes, operator theory and linear algebra. While he maintains all these interests to varying degrees, his current research emphasizes their applications to problems of semiconductor manufacturing and high-speed digital communications. He is the author of Linear Systems, Prentice Hall, 1980,Lectures on Wiener and Kalman Filtering, Springer-Verlag, 1981; and co-author of Digital Neural Computation (with S. Siu and V. Roychowdhury), Prentice Hall, 1995; Indefinite Quadratic Estimation and Control (with B. Hassibi and A. H. Sayed), SIAM, 1999; Linear Estimation (with A. H. Sayed and B. Hassibi), Prentice Hall, 2000. He edited the reprint volume, Benchmark Papers in Linear Least Squares Estimation, Academic Press, 1977 and Modern Signal Processing, Springer-Verlag, 1985. He was co-editor (with S.Y. Kung and H. Whitehouse) of VLSI and Digital Signal Processing, Prentice Hall, 1985, and (with A. H. Sayed) of Fast Reliable Algorithms for Matrices with Structure, SIAM 1999.

In the course of his research and teaching, Professor Kailath has mentored over a hundred doctoral and postdoctoral students and authored or co-authored over 300 journal papers. He has received outstanding paper prizes from the IEEE Information Theory Society, the IEEE Signal Processing Society, the European Signal Processing Society, and the IEEE Transactions on Semiconductor Manufacturing. Professor Kailath has held Guggenheim, Churchill and Humboldt fellowships, among others. He served as President of the IEEE Information Theory Society in 1975, and received its Shannon Award in 2000. Among other awards are the Technical Achievement(1989) and Society(1991) Awards of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, the John R. Ragazzini Award of the American Control Council in 1983, the first Stevin Medal of the Delft University of Technology in 1996, a Golden Jubilee Paper Award of the IEEE Information Society in 1998,a Golden Jubilee Medal of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society in 2000, the IEEE Education Medal in 1995, the IEEE Donald G. Fink Prize Award in 1996, and an IEEE Millennium Medal in 2000.

He is an Honorary Editor of the J.of Linear Algebra and its Applications and of the Journal of Integral Equations and Operator Theory, besides serving on the editorial boards of several other engineering and mathematics journals. He has served since 1963 as founding editor of a Prentice Hall series of books in nformation and System Sciences.

Other honors include Fellowships of the IEEE and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and membership of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Third World Academy of Sciences, the Indian National Academy of Engineering and the Royal Spanish Academy of Engineering.

Professor Kailath has co-founded several high-technology companies, three of which are now public: Integrated Systems, Inc., which was founded in 1980 and merged with WindRiver Systems in 1999, Numerical Technologies, Inc., founded in 1995, and Excess Bandwidth Corporation, founded in 1998, acquired by Virata Corporation in 2000, which itself merged with Globespan in 2001.