Ronald W. Schafer received bachelor’s and master’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Nebraska in 1961 and 1962. He received a PhD degree from MIT in 1968. From 1968 to 1974, he was a member of the Acoustics Research Department at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., where he contributed to some of the earliest research on digital signal processing.
In 1974, he joined Georgia Tech as the John and Marilu McCarty Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. During a 30-year career at Georgia Tech, he helped to introduce thousands of students to the field of digital signal processing, and he supervised graduate student research in speech processing, image processing, biomedical signal processing, and communication signal processing. He retired from Georgia Tech as Professor Emeritus in 2004 and joined Hewlett-Packard as a HP Fellow at HP Laboratories in Palo Alto, Calif. He retired from HP in 2012 and is now an adjunct professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University.
Dr. Schafer is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of both the IEEE and the Acoustical Society of America. He has co-authored nine widely used textbooks in the DSP field including Discrete-Time Signal Processing (with Alan Oppenheim, 3rd edition, 2010); Theory and Application of Digital Speech Processing (with L. R. Rabiner, 2011); and DSP First (with J. H. McClellan, 2nd edition, 2016). He has received numerous awards for his teaching and research, including the 1980 IEEE Emanuel R. Piori Award, the 1985 Distinguished Professor Award from Georgia Tech, the 1992 IEEE James H. Mulligan Jr. Education Medal, and the 2010 IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal.