Vahid Tarokh (born c. 1967) is an Iranian–American electrical engineer, mathematician, computer scientist, and professor. 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. 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 the Imperial State of Iran. He received the M.Sc. degree in Mathematics from University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada in 1992, and the PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada in 1995. 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 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. He joined Duke University in January 2018. His current research interests are in representation, computer modeling, inference, and prediction from data.

Honors