Professor Vardy has numerous publications in refereed professional journals and conference proceedings, most of them in the general areas of coding and communications. His specific research interests include error-correcting codes, efficient decoding algorithms, signal constellations and sphere packings, modulation and error-control coding for storage devices, and computational complexity in coding theory. He is a co-author on five patents in these research areas, in the U.S. and abroad.

Alexander Vardy was born in Moscow, USRR, on November 12, 1963. He received his B.Sc. (summa cum laude) from the Technion Israel Institute of Technology in 1985, and Ph.D. from the Tel-Aviv University in 1991. During 1985-1990 he was a Senior Research and Development Engineer with the Israeli Air Force, where he worked on electronic counter measures systems and algorithms. During the years 1992 and 1993 he was a Visiting Scientist in the signal processing and coding group, IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, CA. From 1993 to 1998 he was an Assistant Professor, then Associate Professor in the Coordinated Science Laboratory, the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and the Department of Mathematics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 1996, he was appointed Fellow in the Center for Advanced Study at the University of Illinois. During 1998-1999 he was on sabbatical leave with LaboratoireInformatique, Signaux, et Systemes a Sophia-Antipolis, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France. He is now a Full Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and in the Department of Computer Science, University of California, San Diego.

He received the Levi Eshkol Fellowship, the Rothschild Fellowship, and the Fulbright Fellowship in the years 1990, 1992, and 1992, respectively. He was awarded the IBM Invention Achievement Award in 1993, and received the NSF Research Initiation and CAREER awards in 1994 and 1995, respectively. In April 1996, he received the Xerox Award for faculty research at the University of Illinois. In the same year, he was named a Fellow of the David and Lucille Packard Foundation. He was keynote plenary speaker at the ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC) in May 1997.

He served as the Program Chairman for the 35th Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing. He served on numerous committees of the IEEE Information Theory Society, and was a member of NSF Review Panels for CAREER proposals. From 1995 until 1998, he served on the Editorial Board of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory as Associate Editor for Coding Theory. He was also Guest Editor for the special issue of these Transactions on "Codes and Complexity" published in November 1996. From 1998 until 2001, he was the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. He has been a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society since 1998 until today. He is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a member of the American Mathematical Society, and a Fellow of the IEEE.