Daniel J. Costello, Jr. was born in Seattle, WA, on August 9, 1942.  He received the B.S.E.E. degree from Seattle University, Seattle, WA, in 1964, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, in 1966 and 1969, respectively.

In 1969 he joined the faculty of the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL, as an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering.  He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1973, and to Full Professor in 1980.  In 1985 he became Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, and from 1989 to 1998 served as Chairman  of the Department of Electrical Engineering.  He also was a Research Associate at Cornell University (Summer 1971) and a Visiting Professor at Notre Dame (1983-84), the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Spring 1995), the University of Hawaii (Fall 1998), and the Technical University of Munich (Summer/Fall 2001, Summer 2003, Summer 2005).  He has served as a professional consultant for Western Electric, Illinois Institute of Technology Research Institute, Motorola Communications, Digital Transmission Systems, Tomorrow, Inc., and Kirkland and Ellis.  In  1991, he was selected as one of 100 Seattle University alumni to receive the Centennial Alumni Award in recognition of alumni who have displayed outstanding service to others, exceptional leadership, or uncommon achievement.  In 1999, he received a Humboldt Research Prize from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany.  In 2000, he was named the Leonard Bettex Professor of Electrical Engineering at Notre Dame.

Dr. Costello has been a member of IEEE since 1969 and was elected Fellow in 1985.  Since 1983, he has been a member of the Information Theory Society Board of Governors on three separate occasions, and in 1986 he served as President of the BOG.  From 1992-1995 he was Chair of the Conferences and Workshops Committee and from 2001-2002 Chair of the Fellows Committee of the BOG.  He has also served as Associate Editor for Communication Theory for the IEEE Transactions on Communications, as Associate Editor for Coding Techniques for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, and as Co-Chair of the IEEE International Symposia on Information Theory in 1988 in Kobe, Japan, in 1997 in Ulm, Germany, and in 2004 in Chicago, IL.  In 2000, he was selected as a recipient of an IEEE Third Millennium Medal. He was co-recipient of the 2009 IEEE Donald G. Fink Prize Paper Award, which recognizes an outstanding survey, review, or tutorial paper in any IEEE publication issued during the previous calendar year.

Dr. Costello's research interests are in the area of digital communications, with special emphasis on error control coding  and coded modulation.  He has numerous technical publications in his field, and in 1983 co-authored a textbook entitled "Error Control Coding: Fundamentals and Applications", the 2 ^nd edition of which was published in 2004.