Fatemeh Afghah

McQueen Quattlebaum Dean's Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Ph.D., 2013 - University of Maine
Electrical & Computer Engineering
M.Sc., 2008 - Khajeh Nassir Toosi University of Technology 
Electrical Engineering
B.Sc., 2005 - Khajeh Nassir Toosi University of Technology
Electrical Engineering

Contact Information
Office: 334 Fluor Daniel Building
Office Phone: 864.656.5913
Email: fafghah@clemson.edu

IS-WIN Research Group Website

Fatemeh Afghah is McQueen Quattlebaum Dean’s Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Clemson University and the Director of the Intelligent Systems and Wireless Networking (IS-WiN) Laboratory. She also holds a joint appointment at Savannah River National Laboratory. Her research spans wireless communication networks, physical AI, UAV networks, and multi-modal foundation models, with a recent focus on autonomous decision-making under uncertainty for disaster response and extreme environments.

Her research has been supported by over $25M in total funding from NSF, AFRL, DEVCOM, AFOSR, NASA, and NIH. She is the recipient of numerous honors, including the N²Women Star in Computer Networking and Communications (2025), 100 Brilliant and Inspiring Women in 6G™ List for 2026, the McQueen Quattlebaum Award at Clemson University (2025), the AFOSR Young Investigator Award (2019), the NSF CAREER Award (2020), NAU’s Most Promising New Scholar Award (2020), the NSF CISE Research Initiation Initiative (CRII) Award (2017), and Best Paper Awards at IEEE Asilomar (2025) and IEEE INFOCOM WiSRAN (2022).

Dr. Afghah is the author or co-author of over 200 peer-reviewed publications and six U.S. patents. She has served as an Associate Editor for several journals, including ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare, Computer Networks,Elsevier Journal of Network and Computer Applications, IEEE Communications Letters, and Ad Hoc Networks. She has also played leading roles in organizing major international conferences and workshops at the intersection of communications, AI, and cyber-physical systems, including IEEE GLOBECOM Cognitive Radio and AI-Enabled Networks Symposium (2026), IEEE ICC Aerial Communications Track (2025), IEEE VTC-Fall 6G and Emerging Technologies (2026), the NSF CPS PI Meeting (2025), IEEE INFOCOM WiSRAN (2019), and the NSF Smart Health PI Workshop on “Smart Health in the AI and COVID Era” (2021).