Vahid Tarokh

Vahid Tarokh is an electrical engineer with contributions to telecommunication, specifically to signal processing for wireless communications. He received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada in 1995. 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 1997 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.