Vahid Tarokh

Vahid Tarokh is an electrical engineer who has contributed to telecommunication, specifically to signal processing for wireless communications.

He received his M.Sc. from University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada in 1993, and PhD from the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada in 1995, all in Electrical Engineering. Currently, he holds the titles of Hammond Vinton Hayes Senior Fellow of Electrical Engineering and Perkins Professor of Applied Mathematics at Harvard University's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Tarokh is responsible for a number of inventions. In particular, he is the principal inventor of space–time codes. This includes space–time trellis codes[1][2], combined array processing and space–time coding[3], space–time block codes[4] and differential space–time codes[5]. A US patent filed jointly with Siavash Alamouti (# 6,185,258) in May 7, 1998 discloses a 2 transmit antenna space-time code that is widely adapted in various global standards.

More recently, Tarokh has also contributed to orthogonal frequency division multiplexing, cognitive radio and collaborative communications, pricing, scheduling, sparse representations theory and distributed beamforming.

Tarokh has received a number of awards including the Governor General of Canada Academic Gold Medal 1996, the IEEE Information Theory Society Prize Paper Award 1999, The Alan T. Waterman Award 2001 and was selected as one of the Top 100 Inventors of Years (1999–2002) by Technology Review magazine. In 2002, the IEEE Communications Society recognized him as the co-author of one of the 57 most important papers in all society's transactions during the past 50 years.

Tarokh holds honorary degrees from Harvard University (2002) and the University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada (2003). He is one of the Top 10 Most Cited Researchers in Computer Science according to the ISI web of science.

In 2002, he was named to the MIT Technology Review TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35.

• 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
• Guggenheim Fellowship, 2011
• IEEE Fellow, 2009
• Top 10 Most Cited Researchers in Computer Science (According to the ISI Web of Science), 2002-2008 (every quarter)
• 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 Prize Paper Award, 1999
• Governor General of Canada's Academic Gold Medal, 1996