Naoki Saito is an applied and computational harmonic analyst who is interested in feature extraction, graph signal processing, Laplacian eigenfunctions, and human and machine perception. He received the B.Eng. and the M.Eng. degrees in mathematical engineering from the University of Tokyo, Japan, in 1982 and 1984, respectively. Then, he received his Ph.D. degree in applied mathematics from Yale in 1994 while working at Schlumberger-Doll Research. In 1997, he joined the Department of Mathematics at the University of California, Davis, where he is currently a professor and a director of the UC Davis TETRAPODS Institute of Data Science (UCD4IDS), one of the NSF's Transdisciplinary Research In Principles Of Data Science (TRIPODS) Institutes that bring together the theoretical computer science, electrical engineering, mathematics, and statistics communities to develop the theoretical foundations of data science.

Dr. Saito received the Best Paper Awards from SPIE (1994) and JSIAM (2016) as well as the Henri Doll Award from Schlumberger (1997), the ONR Young Investigator Award (2000), and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) (2000).
 
He is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) as well as a member of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS), the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), and the Japan Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (JSIAM). He also served as Chair of the SIAM Activity Group on Imaging Science from 2013 to 2015, and is a member of the editorial board of the three international journals: Applied and Computational Harmonic Analysis; Inverse Problems and Imaging; Journal of Mathematical Imaging and Vision.