I was born and raised in Tehran, a big city with about 10 million people. Tehran means warm mountain slope and from the north is confined by large mountains. As a teenager, I spent a lot of time hiking in these mountains in addition to playing soccer, table tennis, and other sports. This was during my high school years in a center for gifted and talented students where I studied mathematics and physics and developed a passion for science. At age 18, like any other high school graduate, I had to take a nationwide entrance examination of universities. I ranked first in that nationwide exam, an unusual success that has been affecting my life till today! I had a choice to study any major in any university in my country and since traditionally all top ranked students would study engineering, I picked electrical engineering instead of following my interest in science.

I studied Electronics in Tehran University and received my B.S. degree in 1989. I developed a strong science and engineering background in Tehran University and got interested in communications. I joined University of Maryland at College Park in 1992 to continue my studies in Electrical Engineering.  I received my MS and PhD in 1994 and 1997, respectively and immediately joined AT&T Labs – Research. The dominant culture at AT&T Labs, at the time, was to push the technological limits as far as possible. I was surrounded by the best researchers in the field and soon grasped the thirst for working on challenging problems. During my tenure at AT&T Labs, we invented space-time block coding and established many other fundamental concepts in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. Later I joined UCI, where I continued working on challenging problems in MIMO systems and their effects on wireless communications and networks.