Dr. Robert Gallager has been a Professor of EECS at MIT since 1960 and was Co-Director of LIDS from 1986 to 1998. He is the author of the textbooks Information Theory and Reliable Communication (New York: Wiley, 1968), Data Networks (Prentice-Hall, Ed. 2, 1992, co-authored with Bertsekas)), and Discrete Stochastic Processes (Kluwer, 1995). He is a life Fellow of the IEEE, member of the National Academy of Engineering (1979), the National Academy of Sciences (1992), and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1999).

His honors include the IEEE Baker Prize Paper Award (1966), IEEE IT Shannon Award (1983), MIT Graduate Student Council Teaching Award (1992-3), the IEEE Bennet Prize Paper Award (1993), and two Golden Jubilee Paper Awards from the IEEE IT Society in 1998. He received the IEEE Medal of Honor in 1990. In 1999, he received the Harvey Prize in Science and Technology from the Technion, Haifa and in 2002 received the Eduard Rhein Prize for basic research.