Avideh Zakhor

Avideh Zakhor is an Iranian-American electrical engineer and the Qualcomm Chair in Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on video processing, including coding, decoding, and streaming, as well as urban-scale 3D modeling. Born in Tehran in 1964, her interest in engineering began with exposure to machinery in her father’s button factory. During the Iranian Revolution, she was an exchange student at Atlantic College in Wales, where her family later joined her before settling in Los Angeles. Zakhor studied electrical engineering at Caltech, graduating in 1983 with support from General Motors and the Henry Ford II Scholar Award. She earned her master’s degree in 1985 and Ph.D. in 1987 from MIT, where her dissertation focused on signal reconstruction from threshold crossings under Alan Oppenheim. She joined UC Berkeley as an assistant professor in 1988, becoming the second woman faculty member in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department. Zakhor co-founded OPC Technology in 1996, which later became part of Siemens. In 2005, she founded UrbanScan, acquired by Google in 2007, with its 3D models integrated into Google Earth. She also founded Indoor Reality in 2015, which was acquired in 2019. Her recognitions include the Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1990 and being named an IEEE Fellow in 2002 for contributions to image and video compression. In 2018, she was honored as Electronic Imaging Scientist of the Year for her work in signal processing and 3D technologies. Zakhor is married to Seth Sanders, a ...