Babak Parviz is the CEO and founder of NewDays.ai.
From 2023 to 2025, he was a venture partner at the Madrona Venture Group primarily focused on venture capital investments in artificial intelligence, healthcare, and deep tech.
Before joining Madrona, Babak was a vice president at Amazon for eight and a half years. He founded and led Amazon’s Grand Challenge — the organization responsible for identifying, investing in, and operationalizing substantial new areas for the company. During his time, Amazon grew by nearly 10X to become a trillion dollar company. He led Amazon’s expansion into healthcare, including healthcare services, diagnostics, and implementing machine learning for health. He built and led teams focused on wearables, experiential e-commerce, devices and services for childhood development, and machine learning for biotech, among other areas. Before joining Amazon, Babak was a director and distinguished engineer with Google X. At Google, he founded and led the Google Glass team from inception to launch. He co-founded the contact lens team that became a partnership with Novartis. Babak founded and led the robotics surgery program, later spun out as Verb Surgical and eventually acquired by Johnson & Johnson. Babak has been with the UW ECE Department since 2003 first as an assistant professor, then as an associate professor and currently as an affiliate professor. He has also held visiting faculty positions at Aalto University in Finland, University of Lyon in France, and Stanford University.
Babak serves on the board of directors of the American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS), is a fellow of SPIE, an inductee of the XR Hall of Fame, and has received many recognitions, including the University of Michigan Bicentennial Alumni Award, IEEE CAS Society Industrial Pioneer Award, NSF CAREER Award, Rock Health Inventor of the Year, and MIT Technology Review 35 under 35. His work has been on display at the London Museum of Science and the Computer History Museum and has won Time magazine’s Best Invention of the Year twice. He was recognized by Ad Age as one of the 50 most creative people in the United States.
Babak received a bachelor’s in literature and a master’s in applied and computational mathematics from the University of Washington, a bachelor’s in electronics engineering from the Sharif University of Technology, and two master’s (physics and electrical engineering) and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan. He completed his postdoctoral fellowship in chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University.
Latest Awards
Representative Publications
- Chia-Jean Wang, Ludan Huang, Babak A. Parviz, and Lih Y. Lin, “Sub-diffraction photon guidance by quantum dot cascades,” Nano Letters 6(11): 2549-2553, 2006. [ Link ]
Research Areas
Education
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Postdoctoral Fellowship (Chemistry and Chemical Biology
Harvard University -
Ph.D. Electrical Engineering
University of Michigan -
M.S. Physics
University of Michigan -
M.S. Electrical Engineering
University of Michigan -
M.S. Applied and Computational Mathematics
University of Washington -
B.S. Electrical Engineering
Sharif University of Technology -
B.A. English Literature
University of Washington