Jawad A. Salehi was born in Kazemain, Iraq, on December 22, 1956. He received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of California, Irvine, in 1979, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees, all in electrical engineering, from the University of Southern California (USC), Los Angeles, in 1980 and 1984, respectively.
From 1981 to 1984, he was a full-time Research Assistant at the Communication Science Institute (CSI) at USC, where he was engaged in research in the area of spread spectrum systems. From 1984 to 1993, he was a Member of Technical Staff of the Applied Research Area, Bell Communications Research (Bellcore), Morristown, NJ. In 1990, he was with the Laboratory of Information and Decision Systems, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, as a Visiting Research Scientist researching optical multiple-access networks.
He joined Sharif University of Technology in 1999 and is currently a Distinguished Professor of the Electrical Engineering Department, Sharif University of Technology (SUT), Tehran, Iran. He is the founder and director of Optical Networks Research Laboratory (ONRL) and Quantum Communications and Information sciences Laboratory at the Electrical Engineering Department of SUT, advanced theoretical and experimental research labs in emerging optical wireless and fiber communications as well as futuristic Quantum aspects of communication and biological systems, in particular, animate creatures. He is also a co-founder of the Advanced Communications Research Institute (ACRI) at SUT for advancing the graduate school research program in communications science. Also, he was the Director of the National Center of Excellence in Communications Science at the Electrical Engineering department of Sharif University of Technology from 2003 to 2006.
Dr. Salehi is a recipient of the Bellcore's Award of Excellence, the Nationwide Outstanding Research Award from the Ministry of Higher Education 2003, the Nations Highly Cited Researcher Award 2004 as well as the Outstanding Research Award of EE Department of SUT in 2002, 2003, and 2006. He has been a member of the Iran Academy of Science since 2009 and the head of the Electrical and Computer Engineering group, Iran Academy of Sciences since 2012. Moreover, he has been elected by the Iran Academy of Sciences as a member of Hall of Fame (Chehre Mandegar) in Electrical Engineering in October 2010. He was also elected as a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for his contributions to fundamental principles in optical code division multiple access (OCDMA) in 2011. His breakthrough work on ultrashort light pulse code division multiple access was cited in IEEE Spectrum and Optics News as one of the key developments in the field of electrical engineering and principal advances in the field of optics. He became a fellow of the Islamic World Academy of Science, Amman, Jordan, 2009. He is the recipient of outstanding Inventor Award from World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), Switzerland, 2007, and Corecipient of IEEE Best Paper Award (spread-time/time hopping ultrawideband (UWB) CDMA communications systems) from the International Symposium on Communications and Information Technology, October 2004, Japan. In addition, he was introduced as among the 250 preeminent and most influential researchers worldwide by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) Highly Cited in the computer-science category. He is also the recipient of the first rank in fundamental research of the Khwarizmi International Prize and the holder of 13 U.S. patents on optical communication. From 2001 to 2011, he served as Associate Editor for optical CDMA of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMMUNICATIONS. From 2005 to 2007, he was the Chair of the IEEE Iran section. He was a member of the organizing committee for the first and the second IEEE Conference on Neural Information.