En-hui Yang has been with the Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada since June 1997, where he is now a Professor and Canada Research Chair in information theory and multimedia compression. He is the founding director of the Leitch-University of Waterloo multimedia communications lab, a co-founder of SlipStream Data Inc. (now a subsidiary of Research In Motion), and an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.

He served, among many other roles, as a general co-chair of the 2008 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory, a technical program vice-chair of the 2006 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo (ICME), the chair of the award committee for the 2004 Canadian Award in Telecommunications, a co-editor of the 2004 Special Issue of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, a co-chair of the 2003 US National Science Foundation (NSF) workshop on the interface of Information Theory and Computer Science, and a co-chair of the 2003 Canadian Workshop on Information Theory. He also held a visiting professor position at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, from September 2003 to June 2004, positions of research associate and visiting scientist at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis-St. Paul, U.S.A., the University of Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany, and the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, U.S.A., from January 1993 to May 1997, and a faculty position (first as an assistant professor and then an associate professor) at Nankai University, Tianjin, China from 1991 to 1992.

An innovator, a pioneer, and an IEEE Fellow, Dr. Yang is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (the Academies of Arts, Humanities and Sciences of Canada), and a recipient of several research awards including the 1992 Tianjin Science and Technology Promotion Award for Young Investigators, the 1992 third Science and Technology Promotion Award of Chinese Ministry of Education, the 2000 Ontario Premier's Research Excellence Award, Canada, the 2000 Marsland Award for Research Excellence, University of Waterloo, the 2002 Ontario Distinguished Researcher Award, the prestigious Inaugural (2007) Ontario Premier’s Catalyst Award for the Innovator of the Year, and the 2007 Ernest C. Manning Award of Distinction, one of the Canada's most prestigious innovation prizes. Products based on his inventions and commercialized by SlipStream received the 2006 Ontario Global Traders Provincial Award and were deployed by over 2200 Service Providers in more than 50 countries, servicing tens of millions of home and wireless subscribers worldwide every day. His inventions are also part of the core technologies behind popular smart phones and Direct PC products used by tens of millions people worldwide every day.