H. C. So was born in Hong Kong. He received the B.Eng. degree from the City University of Hong Kong and the Ph.D. degree from The Chinese University of Hong Kong, both in electronic engineering, in 1990 and 1995, respectively. From 1996 to 1999, he was a Research Assistant Professor with the Department of Electronic Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, where he is currently a Professor. He has also been a Visiting Professor at Shenzhen University. His research interests include detection and estimation, fast and adaptive algorithms, multidimensional harmonic retrieval, robust signal processing, source localization, and sparse approximation.

He has been on the editorial boards of IEEE Signal Processing Magazine (2014–), IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing (2010–2014), Signal Processing (2010–), and Digital Signal Processing (2011–). He is also Lead Guest Editor for IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing Magazine, special issue on “Advances in Time/Frequency Modulated Array Signal Processing”. In addition, he is an elected member in Signal Processing Theory and Methods Technical Committee (2011–) of the IEEE Signal Processing Society where he is chair in the awards subcommittee (2015–). He has been named a 2015 IEEE Fellow in recognition of his contributions to spectral analysis and source localization.