Biografie

Joachim Hagenauer received the Ing. (grad.) degree from Ohm--Polytechnic Nuremberg, Germany, in 1963, the Dipl.-Ing. and the Dr.-Ing. degrees in electrical engineering from the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany, in 1968 and 1974, respectively.

At Darmstadt University, he served as an assistant professor and "Dozent". From May 1975 to September 1976 he held a postdoctoral fellowship at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, working on error-correction coding for magnetic recording. Since 1977 he has been with the German Aerospace Research Establishment (DLR), Oberpfaffenhofen, since 1990 as a Director of the Institute for Communications Technology at DLR and adjunct professor at the Technische Universität München (TUM). During 1986 - 1987 he spent a sabbatical year as "Otto Lilienthal Fellow" at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Crawford Hill, NJ, working on joint source/channel coding and on trellis coded modulation. Since April 1993 he is a full professor for Communications Systems at the Munich University of Technology (TUM), where he taught graduate courses on communications theory, mobile systems, source- and channel coding and has been awarded with "Best Teaching Award" of the TUM Student Union. He retired from this position in fall of 2006.

Prof. Joachim Hagenauer served as a guest editor for the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications in 1989, 1996 and 2000, and is a past editor for "Telecommunications Systems" for the "European Transactions on Telecommunications (ETT)." He has organized several sessions at IEEE conferences and acted as the program co-chairman of the 1997 International Symposium on Information Theory in Ulm as well as the Chair of the 2006 Turbo Symposium in Munich. Prof. Hagenauer was a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society for 5 years and in 2001 he served as President of this society. He is a Fellow of the IEEE since 1992 and a "Distinguished Lecturer" of IEEE Communications Society. In 2002 he was elected to the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities (founded in 1759).

His awards include the Erich-Regener-Prize and the Otto-Lilienthal-Prize of the German Aerospace Research, the 1996 International E. H. Armstrong-Award of the IEEE Communications Society for "Sustained and outstanding contributions to communication and error correcting coding" and as the highest honor the 2003 IEEE Bell Medal "For contributions to soft decoding and its application to iterative decoding algorithms". His university, the TUM, awarded him in 2003 with the "Heinz- Maier-Leibnitz"-Medal, the Friedrich-Alexander-University Nürnberg-Erlangen in 2006 with an honorary doctorate (Dr. Ing. E.h.) and the VDE with its "Ehrenring". He delivered invited Honorary Lectures, such as the Chien and Edison Lecture in the US, the Küpfmüller Lecture in Darmstadt and the Vodafone Lecture at the Royal Society in London. In 2014 he received the Science Prize of the German Information Technology Society (ITG/VDE) awarded only every 4th year for outstanding achievements. In 2019 he received the IEEE Information Theory Society Aaron D. Wyner Distinguished Service Award for outstanding leadership in the Information Theory community.

After his retirement he first concentrated his research on some aspects of the Turbo Principle as applied to Relays and Source Coding, but mainly on the newly created area " Information and Communications Theory in Genetics" together with three PhD students and two biologists. Later his interest in history resulted in the co-authorship (with the historian Dr. Pabst) of a book (Beck Verlag, München) about three engineering professors during the “Third Reich”. 

Forschung

• Gemeinsame Quellen- und Kanalcodierung für Sprache, Bild und Ton
• Übertragungsverfahren für zellularen Mobilfunk und "Wireless LAN"
• Kanalcodierung, "Turbo"-Decodierung, analoge Decodiernetzwerke
• Informationstheorie und Codierung für den Genetischen Code