Syed Ali Jafar received his B. Tech. from  IIT Delhi , India, in 1997, M.S. from  Caltech , USA, in 1999, and Ph.D. from  Stanford , USA, in 2003, all in Electrical Engineering. His industry experience includes positions at Lucent Bell Labs and Qualcomm. He is a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California Irvine, Irvine, CA USA. His research interests include multiuser information theory, wireless communications and network coding. 

Dr. Jafar is a recipient of the  New York Academy of Sciences Blavatnik National Laureate in Physical Sciences and Engineering , the NSF CAREER Award, the ONR Young Investigator Award, the UCI Academic Senate Distinguished Mid-Career Faculty Award for Research, the School of Engineering Mid-Career Excellence in Research Award and the School of Engineering Maseeh Outstanding Research Award. His co-authored papers have received the IEEE Information Theory Society Best Paper Award, IEEE Communications Society Best Tutorial Paper Award, IEEE Communications Society Heinrich Hertz Award, IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award, IEEE Information Theory Society Jack Wolf ISIT Best Student Paper Award, and three IEEE GLOBECOM Best Paper Awards. Dr. Jafar received the UC Irvine EECS Professor of the Year award six times, in 2006, 2009, 2011, 2012, 2014 and 2017 from the Engineering Students Council, a School of Engineering Teaching Excellence Award in 2012, and a Senior Career Innovation in Teaching Award in 2018. He was a University of Canterbury Erskine Fellow in 2010 and an IEEE Communications Society Distinguished Lecturer for 2013-2014. Dr. Jafar was recognized as a Thomson Reuters/Clarivate Analytics Highly Cited Researcher and included by Sciencewatch among The World's Most Influential Scientific Minds in 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017. He served as Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Communications 2004-2009, for IEEE Communications Letters 2008-2009 and for IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 2009-2012. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.