According to the story of the college in the following link: https://www.eng.ufl.edu/news/honors-awards/young-uf-faculty-member-racks-in-the-awards-and-fans/
If Grammy Awards were given to faculty, Farimah Farahmandi, Ph.D., would top the nominations list.
Fact is, she is often called “rockstar” in the halls and labs of the University of Florida’s Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) department.
Since joining the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering in 2019, Farahmandi has consistently set a high bar for colleagues, and 2024 was truly a milestone year.
In early 2024, Farahmandi, who received her doctorate degree from UF, received a National Science Foundation CAREER award to support her project SAIF: Security Assurance through AI and Formal Approaches for System-on-Chips. CAREER awards recognize early-career faculty members who are promising researchers and educators.
Farahmandi’s project aims to make microelectronics safer and more secure by developing a cutting-edge artificial intelligence tool that checks the security of modern, highly complex computer chips.
Integrated circuits are critical components in many vital electronic devices and systems, including those used by financial services, military and defense, healthcare, and private business. Such circuits are subject to an ever-growing number of security vulnerabilities and attacks due to their complex functionality and connectivity to the internet. Her framework addresses these vulnerabilities in several ways.
She also plans to integrate research and educational activities by developing a modified curriculum/syllabus for high schoolers, workforce development, minority recruiting, training/workshops for K-12 and undergraduate students, and disseminating research results through publications, seminars, tutorials, and panels.
At the end of the spring semester, the college recognized her with the Excellence Award for Assistant Professors, which is given to professors whose work during the year demonstrates remarkable achievement in research and other scholarly and creative activities.
In May, she was named the inaugural holder of the Walden C. Rhines Endowed Professorship for Hardware Security. That will support her research program, which primarily focuses on hardware security verification and validation.
“Receiving such a prestigious endowment, usually reserved for senior faculty, at this early part of her career speaks highly of Dr. Farahmandi’s accomplishments,” said Mark Tehranipoor, Ph.D, Sachio Semmoto Chair of ECE. “In her community, she is known as an innovator, leader, and outstanding collaborator.”
And as summer started heating up, Farahmandi found herself again being honored with the 2024 Design Automation Conference Under-40 Innovators Award that recognizes up to five young innovators under 40 years old who excel in design and automation of electronics.
Other notable awards include the Young Faculty Award given by the Semiconductor Research Corporation in 2022 and being one of four ECE faculty awarded a US Department of Defense-funded project using cutting-edge technology that plays a pivotal role in the development and validation of complex hardware and software systems. These systems enable engineers to emulate and test their designs before the lengthy step of building physical prototypes. She accomplished this while being named the Yangbin Wang Rising Star Endowed Assistant Professor in 2023.
“Farimah has been incredibly successful in building and running an impressively large and dynamic research group with projects she’s won from federal agencies and industry partners,” said Philip Feng, Ph.D, Wally Rhines endowed professor and associate chair for research in the department for Electrical and Computer Engineering. “She has exceptional visibility, like a rock star, in her field, as a prolific young researcher and scholar.”
She received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Tehran, Iran in 2010 and 2013, respectively.