Vahid Tarokh wins prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship

Vahid Tarokh, Perkins Professor of Applied Mathematics and Vinton Hayes Senior Research Fellow of Electrical Engineering at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), has been awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship.

Tarokh is among 180 scientists, scholars, and artists chosen this year as Fellows from a group of nearly 3,000 applicants across the United States and Canada.

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation selects candidates on the basis of “prior achievement and exceptional promise.”

Tarokh is the only person selected this year in the field of applied mathematics. The $35,000 fellowship will support his research, which aims to understand the spectral properties and pseudo-randomness of matrices constructed from deterministic structures such as codes, block designs, and graphs.

“I’m very grateful to the Guggenheim Foundation for their support,” says Tarokh. “It gives me the opportunity to explore a high-risk idea that may have enormous potential applications.”