Ali M. Niknejad (Donald O. Pederson Distinguished Professorship chair in the EECS department at UC Berkeley ) was born in Tehran, Iran and moved to the San Diego, CA at the age of 12. He received the B.S.E.E. degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1994, and his Master’s and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1997 and 2000. He is currently a professor in the EECS department at UC Berkeley and faculty director of the Berkeley Wireless Research Center (BWRC). He is also the Associate Director of the Center for Converged TeraHertz Communications and Sensing (ComSenTer).

Prof. Niknejad received the 2020 SIA/SRC University Research Award, recognized "for noteworthy achievements that have advanced analog, RF, and mm-wave circuit design and modeling, which serve as the foundation of 5G+ technologies."  Prof. Niknejad was the co-recipient of the 2017 IEEE Transactions On Circuits And Systems Darlington Best Paper Award, the 2017 Most Frequently Cited Paper Award from 2010 to 2016 of the Symposium on Very Large-Scale Integration (VLSI) Circuits, the CICC 2015 Best Invited Paper Award, and the 2012 ASEE Frederick Emmons Terman Award for his research and textbook on electromagnetics and RF integrated circuits. He was the co-recipient of the 2013 Jack Kilby Award for Outstanding Student Paper for the work on an efficient quadrature digital spatial modulator at 60 GHz, the 2010 Jack Kilby Award for Outstanding Student Paper for the work on a 90-GHz pulser with 30 GHz of bandwidth for medical imaging, and the Outstanding Technology Directions Paper of ISSCC 2004 for co-developing a modeling approach for devices up to 65 GHz.

He is a co-founder of LifeSignals and inventor of the REACH technology, which has the potential to deliver robust wireless solutions to the healthcare industry. He is also co-founder of RF Pixels, a 5G technology startup acquired by Skyworks, and is on the board of CalTerah, a CMOS radar technology start-up company in Shanghai. He is also on the technical advisory board of Zendar, a Berkeley based high resolution radar imaging start-up.

Outside of work, Ali enjoys spending time with his family and on the football (soccer) pitch, not necessarrily in that order.