Mahta Moghaddam

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Mahta Moghaddam is an Iranian-American electrical and computer engineer and a professor at the University of Southern California (USC). She develops microwave sensing systems and algorithms that map the environment in high detail. Her work helps study climate change by measuring things like soil moisture and permafrost. She has also created tools that visualize biological structures and guide real-time microwave-based treatments to destroy cancerous tissue.

Early life and education
Moghaddam grew up in Iran with her sister Bita and her parents. She moved to the United States in 1982 to pursue college. She earned a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from the University of Kansas in 1986, graduating with Highest Distinction. She then earned a Master’s and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, working with Weng Cho Chew. Her PhD focused on solving forward and inverse scattering problems in the time domain and modeling subsurface radar.

Career highlights
After her PhD, Moghaddam worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a senior engineer on the Cassini radar project, helping develop radar technologies to study subsurfaces. She contributed to mapping soil and canopy moisture and permafrost with airborne radar data, and her methods showed good agreement with ground measurements.

In 2003 she joined the University of Michigan, where she conducted research on radar systems for subsurface imaging, high-resolution medical imaging, and remote sensing networks. She became a full professor in 2009. Her work there continued to focus on understanding Earth’s land and climate through radar mapping and moisture studies.

USC and leadership roles
Moghaddam joined USC in 2012. She serves as the William M. Hogue Professor of Electrical Engineering, directs new research initiatives at the Viterbi School of Engineering, leads the Microwave Systems, Sensors, and Imaging Lab (MiXIL), and directs the USC Viterbi Center for Arid Climate Water Research (AWARE).

Climate and health research
In 2017 she played a key role in a project to map permafrost in Alaska and Northern Canada, using radar with different polarizations to measure the thickness of the thawed active layer. This work helps track how climate change is affecting permafrost and carbon release.

Entrepreneurship and recognition
Moghaddam co-founded Thermal View Monitoring in 2017, a startup that developed real-time, 3D temperature maps to guide cancer treatment with ablation. The company won the top prize in USC Viterbi’s Maseeh Entrepreneurship Prize Competition. She has published work on methods to create heat maps of targeted regions during treatment to improve accuracy and safety.

She has received several honors, including the NASA Honor Award and NASA Group Achievement Award in 2016, and induction into the National Academy of Engineering in 2019. She also served as president of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society, starting as president-elect in 2019 and becoming president in 2020.

Recent work
In 2020 she and her graduate student Negar Golestani developed a wireless sensor network that uses magnetic induction and machine learning to track human motion, including movements underwater. This technology could be used in healthcare, disaster response, and underwater communication.