As a child in Iran, Farimah Farahmandi, now Ph.D., knew she wanted a math-heavy career.
Every night, she would lie in bed and think about doing research and crunching numbers in technologically advanced countries like Japan or the United States.
But what would that look like? Engineering, sure, but what kind? At age 17, she was considering industrial engineering when her father invited her for a stroll.
“He took me to the mountain near my town for a long walk, and I had nowhere to escape,” she recalled with a smile. “He talked about how the world was changing and how computing would transform everything. He said that soon everything would rely on computers: banking systems, appliances, cars. He told me computer engineering would be at the center of that transformation.”
He convinced her to choose computer engineering, and the rest is history. She traces her passion for hardware engineering to a third-semester class at the University of Tehran, where she first discovered digital circuits.
Farahmandi is now living her dream as a celebrated faculty member and researcher in UF’s Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering (ECE). She is now the Walden C. Rhines Endowed Professor for Hardware Security and associate director of the Florida Institute for Cybersecurity.
An author of eight books, Farahmandi has won the IEEE/ACM Design Automation Conference (DAC) Under-40 Innovator Award, Best Assistant Professor Award at UF, the Pramod Khargonekar Excellence Award, ECE’s Excellence in Research Award, Semiconductor Research Corp Young Faculty Award, a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, 11 best-paper nominations and an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award — all before she was 40.
Which brings us to her latest award (or, rather, one of her latest awards): UF’s 40 Under 40 alumni award. In April, Farahmandi will also receive the Distinguished Young Alumni Award from UF’s Department of Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE).
Her 2024 NSF CAREER Award supports her project SAIF: Security Assurance through AI and Formal Approaches for System-on-Chips. Farahmandi focuses on hardware security and trustworthy system-on-chip design, a rapidly growing field as computing systems become deeply integrated into critical infrastructure, autonomous platforms and intelligent devices.
“We see increasing connectivity between billions of smart devices, and now AI has been added to the equation,” she said. “Devices can sense, act, learn and communicate autonomously. These complex cyber-physical systems rely on highly sophisticated semiconductor chips, and if the hardware itself is compromised, the entire system becomes vulnerable.”
While software vulnerabilities are widely discussed, hardware-level vulnerabilities can be even more dangerous because they are extremely difficult to detect or patch once chips are manufactured and deployed.
“Numerous attacks can happen at the hardware level, and those attacks are really catastrophic,” she said. “These attacks can silently compromise systems ranging from consumer electronics to critical infrastructure and military platforms.”
Farahmandi is considered an emerging leader in hardware security verification and trustworthy semiconductor design, a field vital to national security and the global semiconductor ecosystem.
“I started to bring AI into hardware security,” she said. “We’re using UF HiPerGator facilities to develop and test AI agents that reason about hardware specifications, analyze codes and identify inconsistencies between design/security intents and implementations.”
CISE Research Foundation Professor Prabhat Mishra, Ph.D., calls Farahmandi a “star Gator.”
“Dr. Farahmandi has made fundamental contributions in three complementary avenues: research, commercial and workforce development,” noted Mishra, who also served as her Ph.D. adviser when she was a student.
Farahmandi earned her doctorate at UF in 2018, with her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Tehran.
Google soon came calling, and the offer felt like a dream.
“I also had offers from other universities to be faculty,” she said. “I decided to go to Google. But my adviser was passionately telling me that I should be a professor, saying, ‘You are built for it. You have all of these offers, so don’t throw them away to go to Google.’ But I wanted to go to Google.”
But to work at Google, she needed an export control license, a U.S. government-issued document authorizing the transfer of controlled technology and software to foreign countries.
“They told me it would be, at most, two months. But the export license came in 22 months,” she recalled. “I was on a student visa extension, so I couldn’t just be jobless.”
So she applied to her alma mater.
“The first year of being on the faculty was very successful,” she said. “I submitted around 15 proposals — some of them alone, some of them collaboratively — and 13 of them got accepted.”
She adores teaching. She is the only one in her family who left Iran — “I’m the black sheep of the family,” she joked. “My sisters are medical doctors, my mom studied psychology and my dad is a veterinarian.”
Her parents remain curious about her happy life in swampy Florida.
“It is difficult to explain to my parents what kind of awards I receive,” she said. “The first grant I received, I called my mom and said, ‘I just got a $250K research award from Cisco.’ She replied, ‘Great! Go buy yourself a house.’ She didn’t understand why I was so excited when the money wasn’t something I could spend personally. It is hard to celebrate without them, but I take pride in not giving up on my dreams.
“My motto: Do it when everyone else gives up.”
In Gainesville, she also co-founded Caspia Technologies, which provides AI-powered, pre-silicon security verification solutions to protect semiconductor chips and System-on-Chips from cyberattacks.
“I love UF because UF gave me all of the opportunities,” she said. “UF is my home.”
She thanks Mishra, ECE Chair Mark Tehranipoor, Ph.D., students, sponsors, friends and, of course, her family.
“My parents were always big believers in me. My mom is our biggest advocate and says the sky is our limit,” she said. And while she credits her father for changing the shape of her career, she said, “UF changed my life entirely.”