V. C. da ROCHA JR. was born in Jaboatão, Pernambuco, Brazil, on August 27, 1947.
He received the B.Sc. degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering (1970) from Escola Politécnica, Recife,
Brazil, and the Ph.D. degree in Electronics (1976) from the University of Kent at Canterbury.
He is a Fellow (1992) of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, UK, an Emeritus Member (2008) of the Brazilian Telecommunications Society, and an IEEE Life Senior Member (2012). He is Professor of Telecommunications at the Federal University of Pernambuco. His research interests are in applied digital information theory, including error-correcting codes and cryptography. He has been a Visiting Professor at various institutions, including the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology-Zurich, the University of Leeds and Lancaster University. He has published over 100 engineering and scientific papers, including journal and conference papers, and the books Communication Systems, Springer, 2019 (2nd Edition), Principles of Applied Digital Information Theory, Interciência, 2018 (in Portuguese), and Elements of Algebraic Coding Systems, Momentum Press, 2014.