Lifeng Lai received the B.E. and M. E. degrees in Information Science and Electrical Engineering from Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China in 2001 and 2004 respectively, and the PhD degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the The Ohio State University at Columbus, OH, in 2007. He was a postdoctoral research associate at the Department of Electrical Engineering,Princeton University from 2007 to 2009, an assistant professor at University of Arkansas, Little Rock from 2009 to 2012, and an assistant professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute from 2012 to 2016. He joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of California, Davis as an associate professor in 2016, and was promoted to professor in 2020. He served as Chair of ECE Graduate Program and Vice Chair for Graduate Studies in the ECE department from 2022 to 2024. His current research interest includes information theory, stochastic signal processing, machine learning and their applications.

Dr. Lai was a Distinguished University Fellow at the Ohio State University from 2004 to 2007. He received the Best Paper Award from IEEE Global Communications Conference (Globecom) in 2008, the Best Paper Award from IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) in 2011, the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation in 2011, Northrop Young Researcher Award from University of Arkansas at Little Rock in 2012, and the Best Paper Award from IEEE International Conference on Smart Grid Communications (SmartGridComm) in 2012.

He served as a guest editor for IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, Special Issue on Signal Processing Techniques for Wireless Physical Layer Security, from 2012 to 2013, an editor for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications from 2013 to 2018, an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security from 2015 to 2020, and an associate editor for and IEEE Transactions on Signal and Information Processing over Networks from 2021 to 2024. He is currently serving as senior area editor for IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security,  and an associate editor for IEEE Transaction on Information Theory and IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing.