Martin Vetterli received the Dipl. El.-Ing. degree from the ETH Zurich in 1981, the Master of Science degree from Stanford University in 1982, and the Doctorate in Science from the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in 1986.

After his dissertation, he was an assistant and associate professor in electrical engineering at Columbia University in New York, and in 1993, he became an associate and then full professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley.

In 1995, he joined EPFL as a full professor. He held several positions, including chair of communication systems and founding director of the National Competence Center in Research on Mobile Information and Communication systems (NCCR-MICS).

From 2004 to 2011, Martin Vetterli was vice president for international affairs and, from 2011 to 2012, he was the dean of the EPFL School of Computer and Communications Sciences. From 2013 to 2016 he was the president of the National Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation, before being elected as the president of EPFL.

In 2015, Martin Vetterli was elected to the United States National Academy of Engineering for his contributions to the development of time-frequency representations and algorithms in multimedia signal processing and communications.

Martin Vetterli’s research activity focuses on electrical engineering, computer science and applied mathematics. He has published more than 180 journal articles and is co-author of three reference books. He is also the author of some fifty patents and patent applications which have led to the creation of several startups from his laboratory, such as Dartfish or Illusonic, and to technology transfers through patent sales (Qualcomm).