About

Lara Dolecek is a Full Professor with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and Mathematics Department (courtesy) at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She holds a B.S. (with honors), M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, as well as an M.A. degree in Statistics, all from the University of California, Berkeley. She received the 2007 David J. Sakrison Memorial Prize for the most outstanding doctoral research in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley. Prior to joining UCLA, she was a postdoctoral researcher with the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She received IBM Faculty Award (2014), Northrop Grumman Excellence in Teaching Award (2013), Intel Early Career Faculty Award (2013), University of California Faculty Development Award (2013), Okawa Research Grant (2013), NSF CAREER Award (2012), and Hellman Fellowship Award (2011). With her research group and collaborators, she received numerous best paper awards. Her research interests span coding and information theory, graphical models, statistical methods, and algorithms, with applications to emerging systems for data storage and computing. She currently serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and as the Secretary of the IEEE Information Theory Society. Prof. Dolecek is a 2021-2022 Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Information Theory Society. Prof. Dolecek has served as a consultant for a number of companies specializing in data communications and storage.