Stark Draper received the B.S. and B.A. degrees in electrical engineering and history from Stanford University and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He completed postdocs at the University of Toronto (UofT) and at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto and was an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. As a Research Scientist he has worked with the Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL), Disney’s Boston Research Lab, Arraycomm Inc., the C. S. Draper Laboratory, and Ktaadn Inc. His research interests include information theory, optimization, error-correction coding, security, and the application of tools and perspectives from these fields in communications, computing, learning, and astronomy. He was the recipient of the NSERC Discovery Award, the NSF CAREER Award, the 2010 MERL President’s Award, and teaching awards from the UofT, the University of Wisconsin, and MIT. He received an Intel Graduate Fellowship, Stanford’s Frederick E. Terman Engineering Scholastic Award, and a U.S. State Department Fulbright Fellowship. He spent the 2019–2020 academic year on sabbatical, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, from 2019 to 2020, and visiting the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) in Hawaii, USA. He was the founding chair of the Machine Intelligence major at UofT, served as the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering (FASE) representative on the UofT Governing Council, and is currently the FASE vice-dean for research.  He has been a member of the IEEE Information Theory Society Board of Governors since 2016 and is current an officer.

Ph.D. Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT

B.S. Electrical Engineering, Stanford

B.A. History, Stanford

NSERC Discovery Grant

Canadian Foundation for Innovation: Leadership Opportunities Fund

NSF CAREER grant

2010 Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL) President’s Award

Teaching Awards: UofT ECE Departmental Award, UW ECE Gerald Holdridge Award, MIT EECS Carlton E. Tucker Award

Post-doctoral 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 for "The Conceptualization of an Albanian Nation," Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 20, no. 1, Jan 1997