Gottfried Lechner was born in Vienna, Austria in 1975. He received his Dipl.-Ing. and Dr.techn. degree from the Vienna University of Technology in 2003 and 2007, respectively. From 2002 to 2008 he worked as a Researcher/Senior Researcher at the Telecommunications Research Center Vienna (ftw.) in the area of Signal- and Information Processing.

In September 2008, he joined the Institute for Telecommunications Research at the University of South Australia in Adelaide where he works now as Research Professor in the area of satellite communications. His research interests are in the field of iterative decoding, distributed compression and low complexity implementation.