Hisashi Kobayashi was born in Tokyo, Japan on June 13, 1938. He received his B.S.E. and M.S.E. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Tokyo in 1961 and 1963, respectively. He was a recipient of the David Sarnoff RCA Scholarship in 1960 and the Sugiyama Scholarship in 1958-61. His master thesis was "Ambiguity characteristic of a coded pulse radar" (advisors: the late Professors Yasuo Taki and Hiroshi Miyakawa). From 1963 till 1965 he worked for Toshiba Electric Company, where he was engaged in research and development of an over horizon radar (OHR).

In 1965 he came to the United States as a recipient of Orson Desaix Munn Fellowship of Princeton University and received his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering in 1967. His Ph.D. thesis was entitled "Representation of complex-valued vector processes and their applications to estimation and detection" (advisor: Prof. John B. Thomas).

In September 1967 he joined the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, N.Y. as a research staff member of Applied Research Department, and worked on the LASA (large aperture seismic array) Project, data transmission theory, high-density digital magnetic recording theory, and image compression algorithms.

In 1971 he was appointed as Manager of the "Systems Measurement and Modeling" group, newly created in the Computer Science Department at the IBM Research Center, and was promoted to Senior Manager of "Systems Analysis and Algorithms" in 1974, and directed five groups: (i) computer performance modeling, (ii) teleprocessing and communication networks, (iii) satellite communications, (iv) computer network measurement and control, and (v) storage management and analysis.

During the 1970's Kobayashi's own research focus shifted to queueing theory and its applications to computer systems performance evaluation. His work on application of diffusion approximation to queueing networks was published as two-part papers in the April and July 1974 issues of Journal of ACM. In 1978 he published a graduate textbook "Modeling and Analysis: an introduction to systems performance evaluation methodology" (Addison Wesley). In 1979 he became the Founding Editor-in-Chief of an international journal "Performance Evaluation" (North-Holland Publisher).

In 1981 he was appointed as Department Manager of the newly created "VLSI Design Department", which consolidated all the VLSI design methodology and microprocessor chip design efforts at the IBM Research.

In 1982 Kobayashi was appointed as the Founding Director of IBM Japan Science Institute (JSI), later named the IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory (TRL). He directed a number of research projects in computer science/engineering and manufacturing technologies: knowledge base systems, medical information system, natural language processing, Kanji-input system, Japanese speech recognition, handwritten character recognition, image and graphics processing, communication networks, software engineering, VLSI design, parallel processing architecture, advanced workstation, and robotic systems. The number of staff grew to over 200 during his four year appointment.

In 1986 he joined the faculty of his alma mater, Princeton University, as Dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS) and the Sherman Fairchild University Professor. He played a key role in establishing several interdisciplinary and/or inter-institutional centers and programs in such areas as material science, opto-electronics, earthquake engineering, surface engineered materials, discrete mathematics for computer science, and plasma etching. During the five years (1986-1991) of his tenure as Dean, the number of permanent faculty members at SEAS grew by almost 30% (from 83 to 107), the undergraduate female enrollment increased from 20% to 25%. The total sponsored research grew by as much as 60%, and corporate gifts increased by 150%.

After taking a year sabbatical leave to the University of Tokyo as the NEC Chair for Computers & Communications, Kobayashi assumed a full time research and teaching position in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Princeton since the Fall of 1992, and has been regularly teaching a senior course "ELE 486: Digital Communication & Networks", and graduate courses "ELE 531: Communication Networks," and "ELE525: Random Processes for Information Systems". The areas of his recent research include (i) teletraffic theory and its applications to network performance modeling, (ii) coding and modulation schemes for wireless communications, (iii) coding and decoding schemes for high-density digital recording, (iv) architecture and protocol design of all-optical networks. His current research programs are: (v) protocol design for network security, (vi) UWB (ultra wideband) communications, and (vii) new applications of hidden Markov models (HMM) and efficient forward-backward algorithms (with Prof. Shun Zheng Yu of Sun Yat-Sen University, P. R. China). In addition to these teaching and research efforts, Kobayashi is authoring three textbooks based on his lecture notes. One of them tentatively entitled "Modeling and Analysis: foundations for system performance evaluation" coauthored by Prof. Brian L. Mark of George Mason University will be published by Prentice Hall, hopefully by the end of 2006.