Joseph L. LoCicero was born on September 18, 1947 in the Borough of The Bronx, New York City, New York, USA. He received his academic training at the City College of New York (BSEE 1970 and MSEE 1971) and the City University of New York (Ph.D. 1977). He performed his doctoral thesis research under Donald L. Schilling. Upon receipt of his doctoral degree he joined Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) as a faculty member in what is now the Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department, where he served for over 30 years as Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, Professor, and Motorola Chair Professor, as well as undertaking the position of Acting Chair of the ECE Department for two years. He was one of the co-founders of the Wireless Network and Communications (WiNCom) Research Center.While at IIT, Dr. LoCicero worked on problems in signal processing and communications, focusing particularly in the areas of speech processing, video systems, and wireless communications. He specialized in low bit rate voice, computer generated holography for photonic switching, pitch detection, automatic speech recognition, and nonlinear power amplifiers, among other research topics. 

He authored more than ninety technical articles, three book chapters, and co-edited Tutorial in Modern Communications and the IEEE Press Book Television Technology Today. Dr. LoCicero was advisor to many doctoral students and several students who received the Master of Science in Electrical Engineering degree under his guidance.

Ender Ayanoglu received the Ph.D. degree from Stanford University in 1986. He was with Bell Laboratories until 1999. From 1999 until 2002, he was a Systems Architect at Cisco Systems, Inc. Since 2002, he has been a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine. From 1993 until 2014 Dr. Ayanoglu was an Editor, and since 2014 is a Senior Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Communications. He served as the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Communications from 2004 to 2008. He was the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications – Series on Green Communications and Networking, 2015-2016. After leading the efforts to convert this series into an IEEE journal, he was the Founding Editor-in-Chief, IEEE Transactions on Green Communications and Networking, 2016-2020. From 1990 to 2002, he served on the Executive Committee of the IEEE Communications Society Communication Theory Committee, and was its Chair 1999-2001. Dr. Ayanoglu is the recipient of the IEEE Communications Society Stephen O. Rice Prize Paper Award in 1995 and the IEEE Communications Society Best Tutorial Paper Award in 1997. He was an IEEE Communications Society Distinguished Lecturer in 2022-2023. He is an IEEE Fellow.