Babak Ayazifar

Babak Ayazifar is a Teaching Professor at UC Berkeley's EECS department since 2005. He holds a BS from Caltech (1989) and SM/PhD from MIT (2003). His work focuses on signal processing, education innovation, and curriculum development. He has won prestigious teaching awards including the Goodwin Medal (1999) and IEEE’s Mac Van Valkenburg Award (2012). His research bridges graph signal processing and pedagogical methodologies, with notable contributions to scalable educational tools like Jupyter notebooks.

• Education:
• BS Electrical Engineering, California Institute of Technology (1989)
• SM/PhD Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT (2003)
• Key Roles:
• Visiting Senior Lecturer at MIT (2013–2014)
• Faculty co-advisor for Tau Beta Pi since 2009
• Co-inventor of U.S. Patent 5,387,940 (video compression)
• Teaching Contributions:
• Developed EECS 16A curriculum
• Pioneer of interactive lab tools for signal processing education
• Advocate for TA mentoring and teaching excellence

His research integrates signal processing fundamentals with educational innovation, emphasizing practical applications and student engagement. Recent work includes leveraging graph theory for signal analysis and Fourier pedagogy reform.