Payam Heydari received his B.S. and M.S. degrees (Honors) in Electrical Engineering from Sharif University of Technology in 1992 and 1995, respectively. He received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Southern California in 2001. He is currently a Full Professor of Electrical Engineering and Faculty Chair Secretary of the School of Engineering at the University of California, Irvine.  

During the summer of 1997, he was with Bell-labs, Lucent Technologies where he worked on noise analysis in high-speed CMOS integrated circuits. He worked at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center on gradient-based optimization and sensitivity analysis of custom analog/RF ICs during the summer of 1998.  

Dr. Heydari is the co-recipient of the 2009 Business Plan Competition First Place Prize Award and Best Concept Paper Award both from Paul Merage School of Business at UC-Irvine. He is the recipient of the 2010 Faculty of the Year Award from UC-Irvine's Engineering Student Council (ECS), the 2009 School of Engineering Fariborz Maseeh Best Faculty Research Award, the 2007 IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Guillemin-Cauer Award, the 2005 IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Darlington Award, the 2005 National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award, the 2005 Henry Samueli School of Engineering Teaching Excellence Award, the Best Paper Award at the 2000 IEEE Int'l Conference on Computer Design (ICCD), and the 2001 Technical Excellence Award from the Association of Professors and Scholars of Iranian Heritage (APSIH). He was recognized as the 2004 Outstanding Faculty in the EECS Department of the University of California, Irvine. His research on novel low-power multi-purpose multi-antenna RF front-ends received the Low-Power Design Contest Award at the 2008 IEEE Int'l Symposium on Low-Power Electronics and Design (ISLPED).

Dr. Heydari is the Guest Editor of IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits (JSSC). He currently serves on the Technical Program Committees of Compound Semiconductor IC Symposium (CSICS), and ISLPED. He served as the Associate Editor of IEEE Trans. on Circuits and Systems - I from 2006 to 2008. He was the Local Arrangement Chair of the 2004-2005 ISLPED, and the Student Design Contest Judge for the 2003 DAC/ISSCC Design Contest Award. He served on the Technical Program Committees of and Int'l Symposium on Quality Electronic Design (ISQED), IEEE Design and Test in Europe (DATE) and International Symposium on Physical Design (ISPD). He is the director of the Nanoscale Communication IC (NCIC) Labs.

His research interests include design and analysis of THz/millimeter-wave/RF integrated circuits. He has published papers in premier conferences and journals on integrated circuit design including JSSC, ISSCC, CICC, and RFIC Symposium. Results of the research in the NCIC Labs have appeared in more than 100 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers.

He is a Senior Member of the IEEE.