Elham Izadi received her Ph.D. from the University of Utah in 1991 with a follow-up degree from the University of Paris XI in 1993. She was a Benjamin Pierce Assistant Professor at Harvard (1991-95) and was then recruited by the University of Georgia in Athens (UGA) where she has been a faculty member since 1995.

Izadi's research involves Abelian varieties, and is an expert in Algebraic Geometry and ways giving a way of linearizing various classification problems.