Yury Polyanskiy

Leverett Howell Cutten ’07 And William King Cutten ’39 Professor, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science

Yury Polyanskiy is the Leverett Howell Cutten ’07 And William King Cutten ’39 Professor.

He received his M.S. degree in applied mathematics and physics from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 2005, and his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 2010. After a postdoc at Princeton, he joined MIT EECS in 2011; he currently serves as the Education Officer for AI+D within the Department of EECS. Polyanskiy’s research interests span information theory, statistical machine learning, error-correcting codes and wireless communication. His work is fundamentally rooted in a fascination with the flow of information: be it in the traditional setting of digital communication, or (more recently) in the domain of machine learning from data.

Polyanskiy’s excellence in research and teaching was recognized by the Department of EECS with the Jerome Salzer Teaching Award in 2016, and with the IEEE Information Theory society James L. Massey award in 2020. In addition, Yury was elected an IEEE Fellow in 2024, an Amazon Scholar in 2020, received the 2013 NSF CAREER award and 2011 IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award.