Paul H. Siegel received the S.B. and Ph.D. degrees in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, in 1975 and 1979, respectively.

He held a Chaim Weizmann Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Courant Institute, New York University. He was with the IBM Research Division in San Jose, CA, from 1980 to 1995. He joined the faculty of the School of Engineering at the University of California, San Diego in July 1995, where he is currently Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. He is affiliated with the Center for Memory and Recording Research (CMRR) where he holds an endowed chair and served as Director from 2000 to 2011. His primary research interests lie in the areas of information theory and communications, particularly coding and modulation techniques, with applications to digital data storage and transmission.

Prof. Siegel was a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society from 1991 to 1996, and again from 2009 to 2014. He served as Co-Guest Editor of the May 1991 Special Issue on "Coding for Storage Devices" of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. He served the same Transactions as Associate Editor for Coding Techniques from 1992 to 1995, and as Editor-in-Chief from July 2001 to July 2004. He was also Co-Guest Editor of the May/September 2001 two-part issue on "The Turbo Principle: From Theory to Practice" and the February 2016 issue on "Recent Advances in Capacity Approaching Codes" of the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications. 

Prof. Siegel was  co-recipient, with R. Karabed, of the 1992 IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award for the paper “Matched Spectral Null Codes for Partial Response Channels,” and he shared the 1993 IEEE Communications Society Leonard G. Abraham Prize Paper Award with B. Marcus and J. K. Wolf for the paper "Finite-State Modulation Codes for Data Storage." Along with his doctoral students J. B. Soriaga and H. D. Pfister, he received the 2007 IEEE Communications Society, Data Storage Technical Committee Best Paper Award in Signal Processing and Coding for Data Storage for the paper "Determining and Approaching Achievable Rates of Binary Intersymbol Interference Channels using Multistage Decoding." He holds several patents in the area of coding and detection, and was named a Master Inventor at IBM Research in 1994. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and a Fellow of the IEEE. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2008, "for the invention and development of advanced coding techniques for digital recording systems." He was the 2015 Padovani Lecturer of the IEEE Information Theory Society.