Michelle Effros

Research She moved to California Institute of Technology in 1994 as an assistant professor. Here she founded the Caltech Data Compression Lab, where she continued her work in source coding and point-to-point networks. Her work was initially supported by a National Science Foundation CAREER Award. She established ways to calculate the capacity of large communication networks, building computational tools to bound them. She has written about the rise of wireless networks and their independence of fix infrastructure. Working with Qian Zhao, Effros developed a new technique to compress data using a multiple access source code. In 2001 Effros was selected as one of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Top Innovators Under 35. She introduced an approach that used random linear network coding to transmit and compress information. They went on to show the benefits of this technique over routing-based approaches.

Effros was awarded the IEEE Communications Society & Information Theory Society Joint Paper Award in 2009 for her work on linear network coding. In 2015 she served as President of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Information Theory Society. She delivered a talk at the Claude Shannon Centennial Symposium, discussing communication theory and reliability.