Frans Willems is a Full Professor in the Signal Processing Systems group. He is a researcher, teacher and supervisor in the field of information theory, with research contributions in the areas of multi-user information theory, noiseless source coding, data compression, data embedding, digital communication and biometrics.  

Willems served as Associate Editor for Shannon Theory for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory from 1988 to 1990 and as Associate Editor for Information Theory for the European Transactions on Telecommunications from 2002 to 2006. From 1998 to 2000, Willems was a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society; he became an IEEE Fellow in 2005. He was Counselor of the IEEE Student Branch Eindhoven from 2007-2014, and Chairman of the IEEE Benelux Chapter on Information Theory from 2007 to 2017.  

Willems has contributed more than two hundred journal and conference papers. He holds several patents.

Frans Willems obtained his MSc degree in Electrical Engineering from Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) in 1979 and then got his PhD from the Department of Mathematics at the University of Leuven in 1982. He returned to TU/e in 1982, first as Assistant Professor, later as Associate Professor and currently as Full Professor. From 1999 to 2018, Willems was holding an advisory role at Philips Research, for subjects related to information theory.

Information is driving our society. I want to understand how information should be gathered, protected, communicated, stored, processed, and used in the best possibe way.