He worked at Bell Labs, TRW, and Bellcore (now Telcordia Technologies), researching optical fiber receiver design, propagation in multi-mode optical fibers, time-domain reflectometry, and the end-to-end modeling of fiber-optic communication systems.
[2] He graduated from the City College of New York with bachelor of electrical engineering degree in 1967 and joined Bell Laboratories.
Some of his early analysis developed a model that included what became known as "the Personick integrals" as basic parameters for the capacity of optical systems.
[10] Personick joined Drexel University's ECE department of electrical engineering and computer science on September 1, 1998, as the first E. Warren Colehower Chair Professor of Telecommunications, and as the first director of Drexel's Center for Telecommunications and Information Networking.
[14] Personick joined New Jersey Institute of Technology's department of electrical and computer engineering on February 18, 2008, as the first Ying Wu Endowed Chair in Wireless Telecommunications until 2011.
He was the technical program committee co-chair of the 1983 Optical Fiber Communication conference, general co-chair of the 1985 Optical Fiber Communication conference, and member and chair of the John Tyndall Award committee.
[17] He co-edited a report on "Critical Information Infrastructure Protection and the Law" published by the United States National Research Council in 2003.