Professor Proakis's professional experience and interests include adaptive filtering, adaptive communication systems and adaptive equalization techniques, communication through fading multipath channels, radar detection, signal parameter estimation, optimization techniques, and statistical analysis. ..Proakis has had an impact on a generation of engineering students, as the author of the widely used textbook "Digital Communications" (McGraw-Hill, 1983). An introductory-level text for graduate students, its fourth edition (published in 2000) has been updated to cover new topics including serial and parallel concatenated codes, punctured convolutional codes, turbo TCM and turbo equalization, and spatial multiplexing. Proakis has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in communications, circuit analysis, control systems, probability, stochastic processes, discrete systems, and digital signal processing.

John Proakis joined the UCSD faculty in 1998, while retaining the title of Professor Emeritus at Northeastern University. He received his Ph.D. in Engineering from Harvard in 1967, and subsequently worked at GTE Laboratories and the MIT Lincoln Laboratory. From 1969-98, Proakis taught at Northeastern, taking on a succession of administrative roles that culminated in his Chairmanship fo the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering from 1984-1997. Apart from a landmark textbook on digital communications (see above), Proakis co-authored "Digital Signal Processing" (Macmillan, 2nd Edition 1992); "Advanced Digital Signal Processing" (Macmillan, 1992); "Digital Processing of Speech Signals" (Macmillan, 1993); and "Communication Systems Engineering" (Prentice-Hall, 1994).