Michelle Effros

About Michelle

George Van Osdol Professor of Electrical Engineering; Vice Provost

BS, Stanford University, 1989
MS, Stanford University, 1990
PhD, Stanford University, 1994

Michelle Effros is Vice Provost and George Van Osdol Professor of Electrical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology. Professor Effros received the B.S. (with honors), M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University. Her research interests include information theory and theoretical neuroscience, with results spanning the topics of source coding (data compression), channel coding (reliable communication), network coding (information delivery through shared resources), the mathematical basis for neurostability (a phenomenon that enables a wide array of behaviors and capabilities), and neuronal memory. Her communication technology patents lie at the foundation of Code On Technologies, a technology creation and licensing firm that she co-founded in 2009 and sold in 2016.

Professor Effros is an IEEE Fellow and a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Tau Beta Pi, and Sigma Xi. She is the recipient of awards including Stanford's Frederick Emmons Terman Engineering Scholastic Award (for excellence in engineering), the Hughes Masters Full-Study Fellowship, the National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship, the AT&T Ph.D. Scholarship, the NSF CAREER Award, the Charles Lee Powell Foundation Award, the Richard Feynman-Hughes Fellowship, an Okawa Research Grant, the Communications Society and Information Theory Society Joint Paper Award, and inclusion in Technology Review's list of the world's top young innovators. Her efforts at communicating technical topics beyond technical research communities include articles in the popular science press, videos designed to explain information theory concepts to the public, a 2018 bio-pic The Bit Player about Claude Elwood Shannon, the father of information theory, on which Professor Effros served as Executive Director, and numerous lectures to high school students.

She served as Editor of the IEEE Information Theory Society Newsletter, Associate Editor for Source Coding for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Member of the IEEE Information Theory Society Board of Governors, and President of the IEEE Information Theory Society. She has been a member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Image and Multi-Dimensional Signal Processing (IMDSP) Technical Committee, ISAT, and the Advisory Committee and Committee of Visitors for the Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate at the National Science Foundation. She was Associate Editor for the joint Special Issue on Networking and Information Theory in the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, and Associate Editor for the Special Issue Honoring the Scientific Legacy of Ralf Koetter in the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. Her numerous roles on technical program committees and review boards include General Co-Chair for the 2009 Network Coding Workshop and Technical Program Committee Co-Chair for the 2012 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory and the 2023 IEEE Information Theory Workshop.