She is the author of a textbook on applied linear algebra, and has published highly cited work on the use of differential invariants in image recognition.
[1] She became an undergraduate mathematics student at the National University of Iran, mentored in number theory there by Ahmad Mirbagheri and completing her degree program in three years.
At the invitation of Birkhoff, and with the support of the Iranian government, she went to Harvard University in the US as a special student from 1973 to 1975, receiving a master's degree with a thesis in the calculus of variations.
Pregnant with her first child,[1] she successfully defended her dissertation, The Euler Operator in the Formal Calculus of Variations, in 1979,[1][3] becoming the first Iranian woman to complete a Ph.D. in mathematics.
[6] In 2024, Heriot Watt University in Scotland gave Shakiban an honorary doctorate, recognizing her as "a renowned international figure in higher education, teaching and inspiring generations of mathematicians for over four decades".