Bobak Nazer

Bobak Nazer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University's College of Engineering, where he also serves as the ECE Associate Chair for Undergraduate Programs. He is additionally affiliated with the Center for Information & Systems Engineering and the Division of Systems Engineering. His primary research focuses on distributed computation in noisy environments, drawing from information theory, wireless communications, signal processing, and neuroscience.

His research interests span Information Theory, Signal Processing, Wireless Communications, and Neuroscience. He investigates how to efficiently enable distributed computation in the presence of noise, inspired by ideas from information theory and wireless communications. His work bridges theoretical foundations with practical applications in wireless networks and has recently expanded into neuroscience applications, particularly in analyzing neural data from hippocampal neurons.

Nazer's publication record shows a strong trend toward expanding the compute-and-forward framework for distributed computation in wireless networks, with recent work exploring connections to neuroscience and machine learning. His research demonstrates how structured codes can harness interference rather than avoid it, with applications ranging from wireless communications to neural data analysis.

• Gerald and Dean Gitner Family Award for Innovation in Teaching with Technology, 2024
• Distinguished Faculty Fellow, BU College of Engineering, 2019–2024
• BU ECE Outstanding Teaching Award, 2018
• BU ECE Faculty Service Award, 2017
• Communications Society and Information Theory Society Joint Paper Award, 2013
• NSF CAREER Award, 2013

Nazer has made significant contributions to teaching, particularly through his innovative "flipped classroom" model for EK381 Probability, Statistics, and Data Science for Engineers. His research group has secured multiple NSF grants including a CAREER award and collaborative research projects focused on algebraic network information theory. He has organized several major workshops including the North American Information Theory Summer School at BU in 2019 and the Workshop on Interactions between Number Theory and Wireless Communication in 2016.