Zakhor is originally from
Tehran, where her father was a businessman, the founder of Iran's first button factory; her interest in engineering stems from a fascination with the machines in his factory. She was a high school exchange student at
Atlantic College in Wales when the
Iranian Revolution caused the rest of her family to flee Iran, settling in
Los Angeles in the late 1970s. After finishing high school in Wales, she studied electrical engineering as an undergraduate at the
California Institute of Technology, graduating in 1983. Before falling, the former government of Iran had paid for her schooling in Wales, but its promise of continued funding for university study did not materialize; instead, she obtained student funding from
General Motors, supplementing it with Caltech's Henry Ford II Scholar Award. Continuing her studies at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology under a
Hertz Fellowship, she earned a master's degree in 1985 and completed her Ph.D. in 1987. She attributes her quick finish to a desire to leave the cold weather of Boston. Her doctoral dissertation,
Reconstruction of multidimensional signals from multiple level threshold crossings, was supervised by
Alan V. Oppenheim. She became an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the
University of California, Berkeley, in 1988 at the age of 24. She was the first woman electrical engineering professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and only the second woman faculty member in the department after computer scientist
Susan L. Graham. While continuing at Berkeley, she co-founded OPC Technology in 1996, a software supplier to the
integrated circuit manufacturing industry, which was acquired by
Mentor Graphics in 1998 and after further acquisitions became part of
Siemens. In 2005, she founded UrbanScan, a company for building
3D city models; it was acquired by
Google in 2007, and its technology became an important part of
Google Earth. She founded a third company, Indoor Reality, in 2015, focused on 3D mapping and visual documentation of buildings; it was acquired in 2019 by a European construction supply company. ==Recognition==