Nariman Farvardin received his Bachelor's, Master's, and Doctoral degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Department of Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering (ECSE) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He joined the faculty of the University of Maryland's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1985. He served as the Chair of the department, and Senior Vice President of Academic Affairs, Provost, and Acting President at the University of Maryland. Since 2011, he has been the President of the Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, New Jersey.
He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, holds seven U.S. patents and has co-authored more than 150 technical papers in industry journals and conference proceedings. His major research interests include information theory, signal compression, and applications of signal compression to speech, image, and video coding for wireless communication networks.
He co-founded a start-up company, Zagros Networks, which developed computer chips for networks. He has been honored with the National Science Foundation's Presidential Young Investigator Award, the George Corcoran Award for Outstanding Contributions to Electrical Engineering Education, and the Invention of the Year Award (Information Sciences) from the University of Maryland.