Biographical Sketch for

Dr. Andrew J. Viterbi

Dr. Andrew Viterbi is a co-founder and retired Vice Chairman and Chief Technical Officer of QUALCOMM Incorporated.  He spent equal portions of his career in industry, having previously co-founded Linkabit Corporation, and in academia as Professor in the Schools of Engineering and Applied Science, first at UCLA and then at UCSD, at which he is now Professor Emeritus. He is currently president of the Viterbi Group, a technical advisory and investment company. He also serves as a chaired Visiting Professor at the University of Southern California and a distinguished Visiting Professor at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.

His principal research contribution, the Viterbi Algorithm, is used in most digital cellular phones and digital satellite receivers, as well as in such diverse fields as magnetic recording, voice recognition and DNA sequence analysis.  More recently, he concentrated his efforts on establishing CDMA as the multiple access technology of choice for cellular telephony and wireless data communication. 

Dr. Viterbi has received numerous honors both in the U.S. and internationally.  Among these are six honorary doctorates, from universities in Canada, Israel, Italy and the U.S., the Marconi International Fellowship Award, the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell, the Claude Shannon and the James Clerk Maxwell Awards, the NEC C&C Award, the Eduard Rhein Foundation Award, the Christopher Columbus Medal, the Franklin Medal, the Robert Noyes Semiconductor Industry Award and the Millennium Laureate Award. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, of which he chairs the Computer and Information Science section, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received an honorary title from the President of Italy and the National Medal of Science from the President of the United States.

Viterbi serves on boards and committees of numerous non-profit institutions, including the University of Southern California, MIT Visiting Committee for Bioengineering, Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, Scripps Research Institute, Burnham Institute, Scripps Translational Science Institute and the National Academies’ Computer Science and Telecommunications Board.