Henry Pfister, Addy Family Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Henry D. Pfister received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 2003 from the University of California, San Diego and is currently a professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department of Duke University with a secondary appointment in Mathematics.  Prior to that, he was an associate professor at Texas A&M University (2006-2014), a post-doctoral fellow at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (2005-2006), and a senior engineer at Qualcomm Corporate R&D in San Diego (2003-2004).  His current research interests include information theory, error-correcting codes, quantum computing, and machine learning.

He received the NSF Career Award in 2008 and a Texas A&M ECE Department Outstanding Professor Award in 2010.  He is a coauthor of the 2007 IEEE COMSOC best paper in Signal Processing and Coding for Data Storage and a coauthor of a 2016 Symposium on the Theory of Computing (STOC) best paper.  He has served the IEEE Information Theory Society as a member of the Board of Governors (2019-2022), an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory (2013-2016), and a Distinguished Lecturer (2015-2016).  He was also the General Chair of the 2016 North American School of Information Theory.

Please note: Henry has left the Mathematics department at Duke University; some info here might not be up to date.

Contact Info:

Office Location:	140 Science Dr., 305 Gross Hall, Durham, NC 27708
Email Address:
Web Page:	http://pfister.ee.duke.edu

Teaching (Spring 2026):

• ECE 590.17, ADVANCED TOPICS IN ECE Synopsis

  Gross Hall 318, MW 01:25 PM-02:40 PM

Education:

Ph.D.

University of California, San Diego

2003

Keywords:

Error-correcting codes (Information theory) • Information Theory • Signal processing • Wireless communication systems

Recent Publications   (More Publications)

1. Coskun, MC; Liva, G; Graell I Amat, A; Lentmaier, M; Pfister, HD, Successive Cancellation Decoding of Single Parity-Check Product Codes: Analysis and Improved Decoding, Ieee Transactions on Information Theory, vol. 69 no. 2 (February, 2023), pp. 823-841, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) [doi]  [abs]
2. Coskun, MC; Pfister, HD, An Information-Theoretic Perspective on Successive Cancellation List Decoding and Polar Code Design, Ieee Transactions on Information Theory, vol. 68 no. 9 (September, 2022), pp. 5779-5791 [doi]  [abs]
3. Brandsen, S; Lian, M; Stubbs, KD; Rengaswamy, N; Pfister, HD, Adaptive procedures for discriminating between arbitrary tensor-product quantum states, Physical Review A, vol. 106 no. 1 (July, 2022) [doi]  [abs]
4. Tal, I; Pfister, HD; Fazeli, A; Vardy, A, Polar Codes for the Deletion Channel: Weak and Strong Polarization, Ieee Transactions on Information Theory, vol. 68 no. 4 (April, 2022), pp. 2239-2265 [doi]  [abs]
5. Brandsen, S; Mandal, A; Pfister, HD, Belief Propagation with Quantum Messages for Symmetric Classical-Quantum Channels, 2022 Ieee Information Theory Workshop, Itw 2022 (January, 2022), pp. 494-499, ISBN 9781665483414 [doi]  [abs]

Recent Grant Support

• QLCI - CI: Institute for Robust Quantum Simulation, University of Maryland, College Park, 2021/09-2026/08.      
• CIF: Medium: Coding Theory for DNA Storage: Synthesis, Retention, and Reconstruction, University of California - San Diego, 2022/08-2026/07.      
• Collaborative Research: NSF-BSF CIF: Small: Neural Estimation of Statistical Divergences: Theoretical Foundations and Applications to Communication Systems, National Science Foundation, 2023/07-2026/06.      
• Simplifying quantum characterization through physical symmetries, machine learning, and a top-down approach,, Army Research Office, 2020/10-2025/10.      
• Collaborative Research: CIF: Medium: QODED: Quantum codes Optimized for the Dynamics between Encoded Computation and Decoding using Classical Coding Techniques, National Science Foundation, 2021/10-2024/09.      
• HDR TRIPODS: Innovations in Data Science: Integrating Stochastic Modeling, Data Representation, and Algorithms, National Science Foundation, 2019/10-2023/09.      
• FET: Small: Efficient Inference Tools for Quantum Systems: Algorithms, Applications, and Analysis, National Science Foundation, 2019/10-2023/09.      
• CIF: Small: Improving Quantum Computing and Classical Communication using Discrete Sets of Unitary Matrices, National Science Foundation, 2019/10-2023/09.