Tjalling Tjalkens received the M.S. degree in electrical engineering from the Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands in 1983 and the Ph.D. degree from the same university in 1987.
From 1983 to 1986 he was a Research Assistant at the Eindhoven University of Technology and since 1986 he is a staff member at the same university where he is currently an associate professor in Information Theory. His research interest is in (universal) source coding theory and machine learning and he (co-)authored over 50 papers in this area.
From August 1989 till February 1990 he was a visiting scientist at the Technical University of Lund, Sweden.
He is a co-recipient, with F.M.J. Willems and Yu.M. Shtarkov, of the 1996 IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award and is co-inventor of two patents on data compression systems.
From 1996 until 2001 Dr. Tjalkens was a member of the Board of the WIC, “Werkgemeenschap voor Informatie- en Communicatietheorie”, a professional organization of researchers in information and communication theory in Belgium, The Netherlands, and Luxembourg.
From 1999 until 2003 Dr. Tjalkens was a board member of the NERG, the Dutch Communications and Electronics Society.
He has been a consultant of KPN (The Dutch Telephone Company) on general data compression issues. From April 1999 until August 1999 he was a visiting professor at the Technical University of Lund, Sweden.
From 2011 to 2014 he participated in the European Union project EnLight, which received the ENIAC 2014 Innovation award for the design of intelligent lighting systems.