Eric R. Fossum was born and raised in Connecticut, and received his B.S. in Physics and Engineering from Trinity College, Hartford, CT in 1979 and the Ph.D. in Engineering and Applied Science from Yale University in 1984. He was a member of Columbia University’s Electrical Engineering faculty from 1984-1990 and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Southern California from 2001-2007.

In 1990, he joined the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology and managed JPL’s image sensor and focal-plane technology research and advanced development. While at JPL, he invented the CMOS active pixel sensor (APS) camera-on-a-chip technology and led its development and subsequent transfer of the technology to US industry.

In 1995 he co-founded Photobit Corporation to commercialize the technology and served in several top management roles including CEO. In late 2001, Photobit was acquired by Micron Technology Inc. From 2005-2007, he was CEO of Siimpel Corporation developing camera modules with MEMS-based autofocus and shutter functions for cell phones. He is presently a consultant with the Samsung Electronics Semiconductor R&D Center, South Korea. In 2010 he was appointed as Research Professor at Dartmouth College where he will also teach.

Dr. Fossum has published over 250 technical papers and holds more than 135 U.S. patents. He has been primary thesis adviser to 13 graduated Ph.D.s. He has received Yale’s Becton Prize, the IBM Faculty Development Award, the National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, the JPL Lew Allen Award for Excellence, and the NASA Exceptional Achievement Medal. He was inducted into the US Space Foundation Technology Hall of Fame. He has also received the Photographic Society of America's Progress Medal and the Royal Photographic Society's Progress Medal for the invention of the CMOS active pixel image sensor technology. In 2009 he received the IEEE Andrew Grove Award for his significant contributions to invention and commercialization of CMOS image sensors. He was named 2010 Inventor of the Year by the NYIPLA and in 2011 was inducted into the US National Inventors Hall of Fame.

In 1986 he founded the biannual IEEE Workshops on CCDs and Advanced Image Sensors (now the International Image Sensor Workshop) and was Guest Editor-in-Chief for IEEE Trans. on Electron Devices Special Issues on Solid-State Image Sensors in 1997, 2003 and 2009. He is a co-founder of the International Image Sensor Society, Inc.