Massey was born in
Wauseon, Ohio. As a child, after the death of his father in
Ohio, he moved with his mother and brother to
Mendota, Illinois. At age 14, his family moved to
Ottawa, Illinois. After graduating from St. Bede Academy, he entered the
University of Notre Dame. He received a
B.S. in
electrical engineering from Notre Dame in 1956 and was granted an
NSF Fellowship. After three years of military service, he began graduate studies in 1959 at
MIT, where he concentrated on
coding theory and was awarded a
Ph.D. in 1962, with
John Wozencraft as his advisor. He returned to Notre Dame, where he taught electrical engineering until 1977, publishing significant research in
convolutional codes,
frame synchronization techniques and feedback-assisted communication. After a brief period at
UCLA, Massey accepted a position at ETH Zurich in 1980. He remained there until his retirement in 1998. Massey died of
colon cancer on June 16, 2013 in
Copenhagen,
Denmark. ==Honors and awards==