Vahid Tarokh (Persian: وحید تارخ; born c. 1967)[1] is an Iranian–American electrical engineer, mathematician, computer scientist, and professor.[1] Since 2018, he has served as a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, a Professor of Mathematics, and the Rhodes Family Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University.[2] 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.
He worked at AT&T Labs-Research until 2000, and at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as an associate professor from 2000 until 2002.[1] He worked at Harvard University as a Hammond Vinton Hayes Senior Fellow of Electrical Engineering, and as a Perkins Professor of Applied Mathematics from 2002 until 2017.[6][7] He joined Duke University in January 2018.
His current research interests are in representation, computer modeling, inference, and prediction from data.
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)[12]
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[14]