Sergio Verdú is the Eugene Higgins Professor of  Electrical Engineering  at  Princeton University  where he teaches and conducts research on information theory in the Information Sciences and Systems Group. He is also affiliated with the  Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics .

A native of Barcelona, Spain, Sergio Verdú received the  Telecommunications Engineering  degree from the  Polytechnic University of Catalonia,  Barcelona, Spain, in 1980 and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the  University of Illinois  at Urbana-Champaign in 1984. Conducted at the  Coordinated Science Laboratory   of the University of Illinois, his doctoral research pioneered the field of Multiuser Detection.

Sergio Verdú was elected Fellow of the IEEE in 1992 and member of the  U. S. National Academy of Engineering  in 2007. He received the  2000 Frederick E. Terman Award  from the  American Society for Engineering Education,  and the  IEEE Third Millennium Medal  in 2000. In 2005, he received a Doctorate Honoris Causa from the  Polytechnic University of Catalonia.  He is the recipient of the  2007 Claude E. Shannon Award,  and the  2008 IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal.

2009 Stephen O. Rice Prize in the Field of Communications Theory,

In 1998,  Cambridge University Press  published his book  Multiuser Detection.  His papers have received several awards: the  1992 IEEE Donald Fink Paper Award , the  Information Theory Outstanding Paper Award  in 1998 and in 2011, a  IEEE Information Theory Golden Jubilee Paper Award , the 2000 Paper Award from the  Japan Telecommunications Advancement Foundation,  the  2002 Leonard G. Abraham Prize Award in the field of Communications Systems , the  2007 IEEE Joint Communications/Information Theory Paper Award , and the 2009 Stephen O. Rice Award from the IEEE Communications Society.

Sergio Verdú has served as Associate Editor of the IEEE Trans. on Automatic Control, and as Associate Editor for Shannon Theory of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. He served as President of the IEEE Information Theory Society in 1997. He is currently Editor-in-Chief of  Foundations and Trends in Communications and Information Theory.

He has held visiting appointments at the  Australian National University,  the  Technion-Israel Institute of Technology,  and the University of Tokyo. In 1998 he was Visiting Professor at the  Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of the University of California, Berkeley,  and in 2002 he held the Hewlett-Packard Visiting Research Professorship at the  Mathematical Sciences Research Institute,  Berkeley.

In addition to the 28th Shannon Lecture, Verdú has given the inaugural Nyquist Lecture at Yale University, the 6th Claude E. Shannon Lecture at UCSD, and the 10th Viterbi Lecture at USC.