Draper, Stark
Professor

Biography

Stark Draper cooks up the math that makes your mobile phone work. His other recipes make your computer more energy-efficient, store your personal biometric data more securely, and determine how to operate astronomical observatories to collect higher-quality scientific data more efficiently. He has held academic, industrial and consulting roles with Arraycomm Inc., a telecommunications start-up in California, the Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL), UC Berkeley and UW-Madison. He leads his research team in collaborations with Mitsubishi Electric, Huawei Technologies, Disney Research, Bell Labs, HP Labs, ADI, and AMD, among others. He is a Full Professor at the University of Toronto and until 2013 was an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His research interests include information theory, optimization, error-correction coding, security, and the application of tools and perspectives from these fields to problems in communications, computing, and learning. Professor Draper spent the 2019-20 academic year on sabbatical visiting the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, China, and visiting the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) in Hawai’i, USA.

• PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT
• B.S. in Electrical Engineering, Stanford
• B.A. in History, Stanford.

•  IEEE Information Theory Society (ITSoc), member of the Board of Governors: Chair, ITSoc Committee on Diversity & Inclusion (2020-22), Chair, ITSoc Schools Committee (2018-20), Board Secretary (2016-18)
• U of T EngSci Department, Chair, Machine Intelligence major (2018-19, 2020-present)
• U of T FASE, Chair, FASE Admissions Committee (2016-18), Member, FASE Dean’s Executive Committee (2016-18)
• External review committees: CUHK, SZ, Shenzhen, China (2020), Xidian University, Xi’an, China (2019), Knowledge Media Design Institute, Toronto, Canada

Memberships/Awards

• NSF CAREER grant
• 2010 Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) President’s Award
• Teaching Awards: U of T ECE Departmental Award, UW ECE Gerald Holdridge Award, MIT EECS Carlton E. Tucker Award
• Post-doc fellowships: UofT, UC Berkeley
• Graduate fellowships: Intel Graduate Fellowship,  C.S. Draper Lab Graduate Fellowship
• U.S. State Department Fulbright Fellowship
• Sigma Xi, Phi Beta Kappa, Tau Beta Pi
• Stanford Frederick E. Terman Award in Engineering
• Stanford James Weter Prize in History — best undergraduate history thesis