Joachim Hagenauer
29.07.1941 – 16.01.2026

Joachim Hagenauer, professor emeritus of communications engineering at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), died on 16 January 2026, at the age of 84.

Prof. Joachim Hagenauer earned his bachelor's degree in engineering from the Technische Hochschule Nürnberg Georg Simon Ohm in 1963 and his master's and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering from the Technical University of Darmstadt in 1968 and 1974, respectively. He spent a year, from 1975 to 1976, as a postdoctoral fellow at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY, where he worked on error-correcting codes for magnetic recording.

From 1977 to 1993, he worked at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) in Oberpfaffenhofen, most recently as Director of the Institute of Communication Technology. From 1986 to 1987, he was an Otto Lilienthal Fellow at AT&T Bell Labs in Crawford Hill, NJ, where he worked on source and channel coding and trellis-coded modulation.

In April 1993, Joachim Hagenauer became a professor of communications engineering at TUM, where he taught courses on communication theory, mobile communications, and source and channel coding. He retired in the fall of 2006.

In 2002, he was elected a full member of Section III (Natural Sciences, Mathematics, Technical Sciences) of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Shortly thereafter, in 2003, he received the IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal for contributions to iterative decoding. TUM awarded him the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Medal in 2003, Friedrich-Alexander University of Nuremberg-Erlangen awarded him an honorary doctorate (Dr. Ing. E.h.) in 2006, the German technology organization VDE awarded him its Ring of Honor in 2006, and the German Society for Information Technology (ITG/VDE) awarded him its Science Prize in 2014, which is only awarded every four years.

His selfless commitment to TUM, national and international professional associations, and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities is admirable. Among his many other activities, he founded the first English-language master's program in Bavaria in 1998 and served as its program director until 2006. He was a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society for five years and served as its president in 2001. The IEEE Information Theory Society presented him with the Aaron D. Wyner Distinguished Service Award in 2019.

Despite all these successes and activities, he never neglected his personal side, caring for his employees and enjoying socializing. He was a role model as a gifted teacher, scientist, and supervisor, committed to mentoring in many ways.