From October 1961 to December 1962, he worked in the Communications Research division of the Jet Propulsion Laboratories, Pasadena, Calif., and also taught part time at the California Institute of Technology. He was appointed Acting Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University in January 1963, Associate Professor in September 1964, and Professor in September 1968. He served as Director of the Information Systems Laboratory during a period of rapid growth from 1971 through 1980, as Associate Department Chair from 1981 to 1987, and was then appointed the first holder of the Hitachi America Professorship in Engineering. He assumed Emeritus status in June 2001, but has been recalled to active duty to continue his research and writing activities. Professor Kailath has also held short-term appointments at several institutions around the world, including Bell Laboratories, UC Berkeley, MIT, Cambridge University, K.U. Leuven, T.U.Delft, the Indian Institute of Science, the Indian Statistical Institute, Imperial College, the Weizmann Institute, and T.U.Munich.

Professor Kailath's research has spanned a large number of disciplines, emphasizing information theory and communications in the sixties, linear systems, estimation and control in the seventies, VLSI design and sensor array signal processing in the eighties, and applications to semiconductor manufacturing and digital communications in the nineties. Concurrently, he contributed to several fields of mathematics, especially stochastic processes, operator theory and linear algebra.

In the course of his research and teaching, he has mentored over a hundred doctoral and postdoctoral students, many of them already outstanding in their fields; more than half of them are IEEE Fellows. These efforts have led to nearly 400 publications in a variety of carefully reviewed engineering and mathematics journals(see www.stanford.edu/~tkailath for a listing); several have won outstanding paper prizes, including IEEE Transactions on Information Theory Society, on Signal Processing and on Semiconductor Manufacturing. Professor Kailath has authored several books and monographs, including Linear Systems, Prentice Hall, 1980; Lectures on Wiener and Kalman Filtering, Springer-Verlag, 1981; Digital Neural Computation (with K.S.Siu and V. Roychowdhury), Prentice Hall, 1995; Indefinite Quadratic Estimation and Control (with B. Hassibi and A. H. Sayed), SIAM, 1999; Linear Estimation (with A. H. Sayed and B. Hassibi), Prentice Hall, 2000. Edited books include the reprint volumes, Benchmark Papers in Linear Least Squares Estimation, Academic Press, 1977 and Modern Signal Processing, Springer-Verlag, 1985; VLSI and Digital Signal Processing, Prentice Hall, 1985 (with S.Y. Kung and H. Whitehouse) and Fast Reliable Algorithms for Matrices with Structure, SIAM 1999 (with A.H. Sayed) .

He served as President of the IEEE Information Theory Society in 1975, and received its Shannon Award in 2000. Among other awards are the John R. Ragazzini Award of the American Control Council, the Technical Achievement and Society Awards of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, the IEEE Education Medal, the IEEE Donald G. Fink Prize Award, the first Stevin Medal of the Delft University of Technology, a Golden Jubilee Paper Award of the IEEE Information Theory Society, a Golden Jubilee Medal of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society, and an IEEE Millennium Medal. He is an Honorary Editor of the Journal of Linear Algebra and its Applications and of the Journal of Integral Equations and Operator Theory, besides serving on the editorial boards of several other engineering and mathematics journals. He has served since 1963 as founding editor of a Prentice Hall series of books in Information and System Sciences and on several national and international committees and boards.

Professor Kailath has held Guggenheim, Churchill and Humboldt fellowships, among others. Other honors include Fellowships of the IEEE and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and membership of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Developing World Academy of Sciences, the Indian National Academy of Engineering and the Royal Spanish Academy of Engineering.