Javier Garcia-Frias received the degree of Ingeniero de Telecomunicacion (combined B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering) from Universidad Politecnica de Madrid in 1992, the degree of Licenciado en Ciencias Matematicas (combined B.S. and M.S. in Mathematics) from UNED, Madrid, in 1995, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1999. In 1993, he  received the Premio Nacional de Terminacion de Estudios Universitarios, awarded by the Spanish goverment to the top three best students in the country finishing their studies in Electrical Engineering.

In 1992 and from 1994 to 1996 he was with Telefonica I+D in Madrid, where he worked in the area of communications. In 1993 he was awarded a fellowship from the Spanish government to perform doctoral studies at Escuela Tecnica Superior de Ingenieros de Telecomunicacion, Madrid. From September 1999 to August 2008 he was an Assistant and then an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Delaware, where he is currently a Professor. He is also affiliated with the Delaware Biotechnology Institute. His research interests are in the area of information processing in communications and biological systems, with a focus in wireless communications, iterative decoding schemes for source and channel coding, coding for multi-terminal sources with applications to sensor networks, joint source-channel coding, and cellular regulatory networks.

Javier Garcia-Frias is a recipient of a 2001 NSF CAREER award and of a 2001 Presidential Early Career Award (PECASE) in support of his communications program. He is listed in the 2003 and 2004 editions of Who's Who in America, is an associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications and of the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, and a member of the Signal Processing for Communications Technical Commitee (SPCOM-TC) in the IEEE Signal Processing Society.