Vahid Tarokh

Vahid Tarokh (; born ) is an Iranian–American electrical engineer, mathematician, computer scientist, and professor. From 2019 to 2021, he was a Microsoft Data Science Investigator at Microsoft Innovation Hub at Duke University. Tarokh works with complex datasets and uses machine learning algorithms to predict catastrophic events.

Biography Vahid Tarokh was born in Iran. At the University of Waterloo, he studied under Ian Fraser Blake, who also served as his Ph.D. advisor; his dissertation was titled Trellis Complexity of Lattices (1995).

He worked at AT&T Labs-Research until 2000, and at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as an associate professor from 2000 until 2002. He joined Duke University in January 2018.

His current research interests are in representation, computer modeling, inference, and prediction from data.

Honors Elected as a member into the National Academy of Engineering (2019). 2016 Honorary Dr. Tech. H.C. University of Southern Denmark Sciencewatch World's Most Influential Scientific Minds (2014). 2014 Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher (based only on published papers between 2002–2012). 2014 IEEE Communications Society Award for Advances in Communications Honorary D. Sc., Concordia University, 2013 2013 IEEE Eric E. Sumner Award 2012 IEEE TCCN (Technical Committee on Cognitive Networks) Publication Award (for the modeling and information theoretic development of the cognitive radio channel) 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship in Applied Mathematics (for contributions to the spectral theory of pseudo-random matrices) IEEE Fellow, 2009 Honorary D.Sc., The University of Windsor, 2003 IEEE Communications Society 50th Anniversary Recognition (named by the IEEE Communications Society as the author of one of the most important 57 papers published in society's transactions in the past 50 years), 2002 TR100 Award (selected as one of the top 100 inventors of the year by the Technology Review Magazine), 2002 Alan T. Waterman Award 2001 IEEE Information Theory Society Paper Award, 1999 Governor General of Canada's Academic Gold Medal 1996