Thomas R. Fischer was born in Fairbanks, Alaska, in 1953. He received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the Sc.B. degree magna cum laude from Brown University.
From June 1975 until August 1976, he was a Staff Engineer at the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Cambridge, MA. From 1979 until 1988 he was with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Texas A&M University. Since January 1989 he has been a Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Washington State University. His current research interests include data compression, image and video coding, joint source/channel coding, digital communications, and digital signal processing. During the 1999-2000 academic year, Professor Fischer served as Interim Director of the School of EECS. From August 2000 until June 2004 he was Director of the School.
From 1989 to 1992 Professor Fischer was Associate Editor for Source Coding for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. From 1995 to 1997 he was a member of the Information Theory Society Board of Governors. He was a member and Secretary of the Signal Processing and Communication Electronics Technical Committee of the IEEE Communications Society. He was a member of the Steering Committee of the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing. and has served as a Guest co-Editor of a special issue of the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications. He is a regular reviewer for several journals, and has served on the Program Committee for several Workshops, Symposia, and Conferences. From 1992 until 1996 he was a program evaluator for ABET.
In 1987 Professor Fischer received an outstanding teaching award from the College of Engineering at Texas A&M University. He has five times received departmental teaching awards at Washington State University. He was a co-recipient of the IEEE Signal Processing Society's 1993 Senior Award in the Speech Processing Area. In 1996 he was elected Fellow of the IEEE.