Alain Glavieux, was an Associate Professor at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications de Bretagne (ENST Bretagne), where he lectured in signal processing and communication theory and set up a digital communications research group. He was appointed Professor in 1989, and became Head of the Signals and Communications Department in 1994. In 1998, he took charge of ENST Bretagne's Corporate Relations with Industry and, in 2002, became Head of the CNRS laboratory Algorithmic and Hardware Processing of Information, Communications and Knowledge. In 2003, he was appointed assistant director of ENST Bretagne.
Together with Professor Claude Berrou, Alain Glavieux developed a new family of error correction codes called turbo codes. He also pioneered the principle of turbo equalization.
He received an IEEE Golden Jubilee Award for Technological Innovation in 1998, the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal in 2003, and the French Academy of Sciences Grand Prix France Telecom in 2003.
He passed away after a long illness on September 25th, 2004 at the age of 55.