Bahram Javidi

Bahram Javidi is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor at the University of Connecticut, the highest rank and honor the university bestows on its faculty in recognition of achievement in research, teaching, and service.

An electrical engineer, Mr. Javidi received degrees in that field from George Washington University (B.S., 1980) and Penn State (M.S., 1982, Ph.D., 1986). He then served as a Visiting Assistant Professor for two years at Michigan State University before taking up an appointment as Assistant Professor of Electrical and Systems Engineering at the University of Connecticut in 1988; he was promoted to Associate Professor in 1991 and to Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the Nano-Technology Group in 1996. Other institutions were also quick to recognize his talents, and during his 1994 sabbatical year, he was appointed either a visiting faculty member or visiting scientist at the Thomson-CSF Research Labs in Orsay, France; the Rome Lab, at the U.S. Air Force Hanscom Base in Boston; and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The University of Connecticut further honored his exceptional abilities in 2002, with its Distinguished Professor award; two years later he rose to his present rank. Since 2007, he is also a member of the university’s Biomedical Engineering faculty.

During his years at UConn, Bahram Javidi has supervised over ninety masters- and doctoral-level graduate students, postdoctoral students, and visiting professors, scientists, and scholars. In addition, he has over 630 publications to his credit, including many written in collaboration with scientists from around the world. His nine books and many articles in such prominent journals as Proceedings of the IEEE, Journal of the Royal Society, Physics Today, Nature, National Academy of Engineering, NSF Newsletter, and Optics and Photonics, among many others, have earned him many awards: the IEEE Donald G. Fink prize (2008), Lockheed Martin Automatic Target Recognition best paper award (co-recipient, 2008); Information Optics best paper (co-recipient, 2007); IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology best paper (2002, 2005), to name a few. In 2007, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation awarded him the Humboldt Prize, the highest research award for senior U.S. scientists and scholars in all disciplines. Earlier in his career, he was named a NSF Presidential Young Investigator (1990) and more recently the Dennis Gabor Award in Diffractive Wave Technologies from the International Society for Optical Engineering (2007).

Bahram Javidi has been the Distinguished Lecturer at Northwestern University, the IEEE Distinguished Lecturer at various IEEE chapters in the U.S., Europe, and Asia; the Eastman Kodak Weissberger-Williams Lecturer; and the invited speaker over sixty times at conferences and universities. He has also either chaired or been a program committee member of more than thirty national and international conferences on optics and photonics, imaging, and information systems, sponsored by IEEE, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. Air Force, Optical Society of America (OSA), International Society for Optical Engineering (SPIE), European Optical Society, Japan Applied Physics Society, Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE, U.K.), French Optical Society, and International Commission for Optics (ICO), to name a few.

He has received Fellowships from seven national and international professional scientific societies, and is an elected Fellow of IEEE, American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, OSA, SPIE, Institute of Physics, Society for Imaging Science and Technology, and IEE.

During his Guggenheim Fellowship term, Bahram Javidi studied real-time automated detection and identification of biological micro-organisms using optical technology.