Melika Payvand is a senior research scientist (starting as assistant professor in Feb 2023) at the Institute of Neuroinformatics, University of Zurich and ETH Zurich. She received her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical and computer engineering from the University of California Santa Barbara in 2012 and 2016 respectively. Her research interest is in understanding the organizing principles of biological nervous systems and employing them in building more efficient and intelligent artificial systems, following a co-design approach across devices, circuits and algorithms.

She is an active member of the neuromorphic community, co-coordinating the European NEUROTECH project, co-chairing the International Conference on Neuromorphic Systems (ICONS), and serving as a scientific committee member of the Capocaccia neuromorphic intelligence workshop.

She has served as the chair of the neuromorphic engineering track at the IEEE ISCAS conference, and has co-organized the Women in Circuits and Systems (WiCAS) event at the IEEE ICECS conference. She has also served as the guest editor of Frontiers in Neuroscience and IOP journal of neuromorphic computing and engineering. She is the winner of the best neuromorph award of the 2019 Telluride neuromorphic workshop.