Karagozian is
Armenian American; all four of her grandparents emigrated to the US to escape the
Armenian genocide in early 20th-century Turkey. Her mother, Violet Jamgochian Karagozian, was a high school mathematics teacher, and her father, Albert Karagozian, was an accountant. As a high school student in Los Angeles, Karagozian was able to take classes in both engineering and Armenian literature at UCLA. She graduated
summa cum laude from UCLA in 1978, majoring in engineering, and earned a Ph.D. from the
California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1982. Her dissertation,
An Analytical Study of Diffusion Flames in Vortex Structures, was supervised by
Frank E. Marble; she was Marble's only female student, and became the first woman to complete a doctorate in mechanical engineering at Caltech. On completing her doctorate, she returned to UCLA as an assistant professor. She was promoted to full professor in 1993 and named a distinguished professor in 2016. She served as interim vice chancellor for research for 2016–2017, and became the inaugural director of the Promise Armenian Institute in 2020. She has been a trustee of the
Institute for Defense Analyses since 2011, and of the
American University of Armenia since 2012. She has served on the
United States Air Force Scientific Advisory Board several times beginning in 1997, and was vice chair of the board from 2005 to 2009. She has also served the
American Physical Society as division chair for the division of fluid dynamics. ==Recognition==