By testing out of some courses and taking summer courses in Colorado, Earl J. Swartzlander, Jr. completed his undergraduate work at Purdue in just three and a half years and launched a distinguished career that has interwoven academia and industry. His first project for Ball Brothers Research Corporation was designing an electronics system for an experiment that "flew" on Skylab. In 1969, he completed his MSEE at the University of Colorado and joined Hughes Aircraft Co. As a Howard Hughes Doctoral Fellow, Swartzlander completed his PhD at the University of Southern California.

In 1973, he began work for Technology Service Corporation but soon moved to Geophysical Systems Corporation where he developed a system for field acquisition of seismic data. Completing that project, he joined the TRW Electronic Systems Division, managed several signal processor development projects, and provided technical support for the TRW single chip 16-bit array multiplier. Continuing his career with TRW, he worked on the team that developed the Modular Transform Processor and the Image Rotation Sequencer VLSI chip.

In 1985, he was promoted to digital development laboratory manager for the Electronic Systems Group and, in 1987, became director of independent research and development for the Defense Systems Group. In 1990, he was named to the Schlumberger Centennial Chair in Engineering at the University of Texas, Austin.

Swartzlander has edited several books, written dozens of articles and papers, and served as editor of several IEEE journals including IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems. He was founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of VLSI Signal Processing. He presently is conducting research in application specific computing systems and serves as editor in chief of IEEE Transactions on Computers.