Hamid Jafarkhani received the B.S. degree in electronics from Tehran University in 1989 and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees both in electrical engineering from the University of Maryland at College Park in 1994 and 1997, respectively.
From June 1996 to Sept. 1996, he was a summer intern at Lucent Technologies (Bell Labs). He joined AT&T Labs-Research as a Senior Technical Staff Member in Aug. 1997. Later he was promoted to a Principal Technical Staff Member. While at AT&T Labs, he and his colleagues invented space-time block coding, a MIMO technology, that has become an active area of research and is widely used in practice. He was with Broadcom Corp. as a Senior Staff Scientist from July 2000 to Sept. 2001. He joined University of California, Irvine in 2001. He was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University in 2015 and a Visiting Professor at California Institute of Technology in 2018. Currently, he is a Chancellor's Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine where he is also the Director of Center for Pervasive Communications & Computing and the Conexant-Broadcom Endowed Chair. He is a former Director of Networked Systems Program at UCI. He was the 2020-2022 elected Faculty Chair of the UCI School of Engineering.
Hamid Jafarkhani is the 2017 Innovation Hall of Fame Inductee at the University of Maryland's School of Engineering. Among his awards are the 2006 IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award in Wireless Communications, the 2013 IEEE Eric E. Sumner Award (IEEE Technical Field Award), the 2014 IEEE Communications Society Award for Advances in Communication, the 2020 IEEE Wireless Communications Technical Committee Recognition Award, and the 2022 IEEE Signal Processing and Computing for Communications Technical Recognition Award.
Hamid Jafarkhani ranked first in the nationwide entrance examination of Iranian universities in 1984. He was a co-recipient of the American Division Award of the 1995 Texas Instruments DSP Solutions Challenge. He received an NSF Career Award in 2003. He received the UCI Distinguished Mid-Career Faculty Award for Research in 2006 and the School of Engineering Fariborz Maseeh Best Faculty Research Award in 2007. Also, he was a co-recipient of the 2002 best paper award of ISWC, the 2009 best paper award of the Journal of Communications and Networks, the 2012 IEEE Globecom best paper award (Communication Theory Symposium), and the 2018 IEEE ICC best paper award (Communication Theory Symposium). He received the 2015-2016 School of Engineering Excellence in Research Senior Career Award and the 2024 School of Engineering Faculty Service Award.
He was an associate editor for the IEEE Communications Letters form 2001-2005, an editor for the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications from 2002-2007 and an editor for the IEEE Transactions on Communications from 2005-2007. He was a guest editor of the special issue on "MIMO-Optimized Transmission Systems for Delivering Data and Rich Content" for the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing in 2008, and an area editor for the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications from 2007-2012. He was the general chair of the 2015 IEEE Communication Theory Workshop. He was a Distinguished Lecturer for IEEE Communications Society from 2014-2015 and a Steering Committee Member of the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications from 2012-2016. He was a member of the 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020 IEEE Fellow Committee. Also, he was the general co-chair of the 2018 IEEE Global Conference on Signal and Information Processing (GlobalSIP).
Hamid Jafarkhani is an ISI highly cited researcher. According to the Thomson Scientific, he is one of the top 10 most-cited researchers in the field of "computer science" during 1997-2007. He is a Fellow of AAAS, an IEEE Fellow, a Distinguished Fellow of IETI, and the author of the book Space-Time Coding: Theory and Practice.