Dr. David A. Huffman is presently an Emeritus Professor in the Computer and Information Sciences Department at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He received his B.E.E. and M.Sc.E.E. degrees from Ohio State University in 1944 and 1949, respectively, and his Sc.D. in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1953. From 1962 to 1967, he was Professor of Electrical Engineering at M.I.T. Prof. Huffman has been a consultant for numerous government agencies and industrial research laboratories, including the President's Science Advisory Committee, Air Force Science Advisory Board, National Security Agency, Institute for Defense Analysis, Lincoln Laboratory, Bell Telephone Laboratory, Stanford Research Institute and Space Technology Laboratories.
Prof. Huffman's Sc.D. thesis, "The Synthesis of Sequential Switching Circuits", was awarded the Louis E. Levy Medal of the Franklin Institute (1955). A more recent paper, "The Generation of Impulse-Equivalent Pulse Trains", was given an award as the Best Paper of the Year (1962) by the Professional-Technical Group on Information Theory of the IEEE. A technique, now known as the Huffman Coding, was the subject of an early paper: "A Method for The Construction of Minimum Redundancy Codes".
He is a Fellow of IEEE. In 1974, he received the W. Wallace McDowell Award from the IEEE
Computer Society "for his contributions to the solution of sequential
circuit problems and coding theory, and for his leadership as a teacher." In 1982, he
was awarded a Computer Pioneer medal "for his work in Sequential Circuit Design