She is a professor and Henry Booker Faculty Scholar of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, San Diego.

[2] Koushanfar obtained her bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Sharif University of Technology (BSEE 1998), a master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2000, and a second master's degree in statistics and Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley in 2005,[2] with the dissertation Ensuring data integrity in sensor-based networked systems jointly supervised by Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli and Miodrag Potkonjak.

[2] In 2008, Koushanfar was listed in the MIT Technology Review "35 Innovators Under 35" for her work using random variation in integrated circuits as a device fingerprint allowing manufacturers to validate the authenticity of devices.

[6] She was named a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2010[7] and an IEEE Fellow in 2019, "for contributions to hardware and embedded systems security and to privacy-preserving computing".

[8] She was named to the 2022 class of ACM Fellows, "for contributions to secure computing and privacy-preserving machine learning".