[3] Huffman earned his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Ohio State University in 1944.
He returned to Ohio State to earn his master's degree in electrical engineering in 1949.
In 1953, he earned his Doctor of Science in electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), with the thesis The Synthesis of Sequential Switching Circuits, advised by Samuel H.
In 1967, he joined the faculty of University of California, Santa Cruz and helped found its Computer Science Department, where he served as chair from 1970 to 1973.
[5] Huffman reportedly was more proud of his work "The Synthesis of Sequential Switching Circuits,"[1] which was the topic of his 1953 MIT thesis (an abridged version of which was published in the Journal of the Franklin Institute in 1954.