Rick S. Blum received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University in 1984 and his M.S. and Ph.D in Electrical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 1987 and 1991. From 1984 to 1991 he was a member of technical staff at General Electric Aerospace in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania and he graduated from GE`s Advanced Course in Engineering. 

Since 1991, he has been with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania where he is currently a Professor and holds the Robert W. Wieseman Endowed Professorship in Electrical Engineering. His research interests include machine learning and signal processing for security, smart grid, communications, sensor networking, radar and sensor processing. He was on the editorial board for the Journal of Advances in Information Fusion of the International Society of Information Fusion. He was an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing and for IEEE Communications Letters. He has edited special issues for IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing and IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications. He was a member of the SAM Technical Committee (TC) of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. He was a member of the Signal Processing for Communications TC of the IEEE Signal Processing Society and is a member of the Communications Theory TC of the IEEE Communication Society. He was on the awards Committee of the IEEE Communication Society. 

Dr. Blum is a Fellow of the IEEE and served two terms as an IEEE Signal Processing Society Distinguished Lecturer. He is an IEEE Third Millennium Medal winner, Eleanor and Joseph F. Libsch Research Award winner (Lehigh highest senior research award), a member of Eta Kappa Nu and Sigma Xi, and holds several patents. He was awarded an ONR Young Investigator Award in 1997 and an NSF Research Initiation Award in 1992. His IEEE Fellow Citation`for scientific contributions to detection, data fusion and signal processing with multiple sensors'' acknowledges contributions to the field of sensor networking'.