About Me

Born and raised in Montreal (to a Belgian family), I received my B.Eng in Electrical Engineering in December 2001 from McGill’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Thereafter I lived in Fukuoka, Japan for 8 months before attending Harvard for my Master’s and Ph.D. degrees under the supervision of Vahid Tarokh. During the course of my studies I was a research intern at Intel and Mitusbishi Electric Research Labs. In June 2007 I obtained my Ph.D. in Engineering Science from the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, with a thesis entitled “Information Theoretic Limits of Cooperation and Cognition in Wireless Networks.” From July 2007 – June 2008 I was a lecturer/post-doc at Harvard University, where I co-taught AM21aand AM21b. From August – December 2008, my husband Prof. Jakob Eriksson and I traveled the world.
In January 2009 I joined the ECE Department at the University of Illinois at Chicagoas an Assistant Professor. In August 2015 I became an Associate Professor, and my family and I went on a sabbatical for 16 months including 10 countries. In 2020 I became a Full Professor, and in October 2024 a Richard and Loan Hill Professor. My research interests lie in multi-user information theory and applications to cognitive and software-defined radio, radar, massive multiple-access, low-latency, two-way and wireless communications in general. Recently, I have become interested in the statistical analysis of hardware security systems and learned error correcting codes. I like inter-disciplinary work and learning new languages of all sorts.

Natasha Devroye is a Richard and Loan Hill Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), which she joined in January 2009. From July 2007 until July 2008 she was a Lecturer at Harvard University. Dr. Devroye obtained her Ph.D in Engineering Sciences from the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University in 2007, and an Honors B. Eng in Electrical Engineering from McGill University in 2001. Dr. Devroye was a recipient of an NSF CAREER award in 2011 and was named UIC’s Researcher of the Year in the “Rising Star” category in 2012. She has been an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEE Journal of Selected Areas in Communications, the IEEE Transactions on Cognitive Communications and Networking and is currently an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. She co-chaired the Women in Information Theory Society from 2015-2018 and is an Information Theory Society Distinguished Lecturer for 2019-2021. Her research interests lie in multi-user information theory and applications to cognitive and software-defined radio, radar, massive multiple-access, low-latency, two-way and wireless communications in general. Recently, she has become interested in the statistical analysis of hardware security systems and interpreting learned error-correcting codes.