PhD from Dept. of Mathematics, 1982
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
MSc Electrical Engineering, 1979
Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, The Netherlands
Frans M.J. Willems was born in Stein, The Netherlands, in 1954. He received the MSc degree in Electrical Engineering from the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, The Netherlands, and the PhD degree from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, in 1979 and 1982 respectively. In 1982 he joined the Electrical Engineering Department of the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, where he is a professor now. Since 1999 he is an advisor for Philips Research Laboratories, Eindhoven, for subjects related to information theory.
Dr. Willems received the Marconi Young Scientist Award in 1982. From 1988 to 1990, he served as Associate Editor for Shannon Theory for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. From 2002 to 2006 he was Associate Editor for Information Theory for the European Transactions on Telecommunications. He is co-recipient of the 1996 IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award for a paper in which the Context-Tree Weighting Algorithm was proposed. From 1998 to 2000 he was a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society. Since 2005 Dr. Willems is an IEEE Fellow. He was Counselor of the IEEE Student Branch Eindhoven from 2007-2014, and is Chairman of the IEEE Benelux Chapter on Information Theory since 2007. Dr. Willems received a 2011 Best Paper Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society for the paper “Biometric Systems: Privacy and Security Aspects.” In 2014-2015 Dr. Willems was a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Information Theory Society.
Dr. Willems has contributed more than two hundred journal and conference papers. He holds several patents.