William C. Lindsey came to Purdue in 1958 after completing his bachelor's degree at the University of Arkansas. Lindsey received his master's degree from Purdue in 1959 and his Ph.D. in 1962 and then joined the technical staff at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In 1965 he was promoted to research group supervisor. From 1968 until 1974 he devoted a major portion of his time to consulting with government and industry on communications and information science. In 1968 he became a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Southern California where he teaches graduate level courses in communications and information science. In 1974 Lindsey founded his own company, LinCom Corporation, which performs research and development for government and commercial markets, and provides technical guidance to, and management of, system engineers and architects.

The holder of four patents, Lindsey is also the author of three landmark textbooks on digital communication and synchronization systems and the editor of two best-selling IEEE Press books on synchronization and the ubiquitous phase-locked loop. He invented the first all-digital bit synchronization algorithm used in Mariner'69 to decode the first block-coded pictures from Mars. That algorithm became the standard for code synchronization in NASA's receivers in the Space Shuttle, Pioneer, Voyager, Galileo, and Viking, as well as in numerous commercial and military spread spectrum receivers.

Lindsey is a member of Tau Beta Pi, Eta Kappa Nu, Sigma Xi, and Pi Mu Epsilon and is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. He was named to the prestigious National Academy of Engineering in 1997.