Behrooz Kamgar-Parsi, PhD

Behrooz Kamgar-Parsi, PhD, Research Scientist at the Naval Research Laboratory, has been recognized by Marquis Who’s Who Top Scientists for dedication, achievements, and leadership in science and research.

Dr. Kamgar-Parsi has notable achievements in medicine and artificial intelligence. He discovered that large doses of vitamin B12 can treat circadian rhythm disorders such as delayed sleep phase syndrome (DSPS) and non-24-hour sleep-wake syndrome (N24). He invented an approach for replicating human functionality in a face recognition system. His system recognizes people on its watch list accurately like humans recognizing people they see often, without the ability to recognize anyone else like humans not recognizing strangers. His recognition system does not violate anyone’s privacy other than “wanted” people.His advice to researchers is to be creative and bold. Do not allow to be intimated if your approach negates the prevailing approach followed by big names in the field, unless there is a sound scientific reason.

As an industry leader in computer science, Dr. Kamgar-Parsi has dedicated his career to research in medicine and computer science vision. With a career spanning four decades, he is proud to have contributed to the Naval Research for more than 30 years. Born and raised in Shiraz, Iran, he initially obtained a Bachelor of Science from Tehran University in 1968. Upon immigrating to the United States in 1972, he continued his studies to earn a PhD in physics from the Catholic University of America in 1978.

Upon graduation, Dr. Kamgar-Parsi began his professional career as a patient researcher in sleep disorders for the National Institutes of Health until 1981. Thereafter, he continued to garner expertise with the aforementioned organization as a visiting scientist for the Division of Computer Research and Technology until 1984. Over the course of the following decade, he found notable success as a research scientist at the Computer Vision Laboratory at the University of Maryland and an assistant professor of computer science at George Mason University. Supplementing his professional career, he has excelled as an editor for the Journal of Pattern Recognition Letters. Moreover, he is an active contributor to various scientific articles and professional journals within the field.
Some of Dr. Kamgar-Parsi’s most significant work is on sleep disorders and face recognition. Other areas that he has contributed to include the development of vision-based guidance systems for air vehicles to autonomously follow shorelines and roads without requiring GPS; charting the ocean floor through automated registration of overlapping swaths of depth data, evaluating quantization errors in computer vision as pixel digitization introduces serious round off errors in computational approaches, and developing capabilities for Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) to reject unfamiliar patterns as opposed to confusing them with members of classes of patterns that an ANN is familiar with.

Over the course of his career, Dr. Kamgar-Parsi has maintained professional affiliations with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Computer Society, the United States Chess Federation and the SPIE Society. For his contributions in the field, he is honored to have been a recipient of the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award. A celebrated Marquis listee, he is gratified to have been selected for inclusion in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in the East and Who’s Who in the World multiple times over the course of his career. Though his career has been suffused with highlights regarding various scientific breakthroughs, his particularly notable achievement is focusing on his family and raising his children, Liana, Kaveh and Pareesa.