Dembo received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1980 from the Technion.
He obtained in 1986 his doctorate in electrical engineering under the supervision of
David Malah with the thesis "Design of Digital FIR Filter Arrays".[3] He joined Stanford University as Assistant Professor of Statistics and Mathematics in 1990, and is currently the Marjorie Mhoon Fair Professor in Quantitative Science there.
His research deals with probability theory and stochastic processes, the theory of large deviations, the spectral theory of random matrices, random walks, and interacting particle systems.
He was Invited Speaker with the talk Simple random covering, disconnection, late and favorite points at the ICM in Madrid in 2006. Dembo is a fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.
Zhan Shi: Problèmes de recouvrement et points exceptionnels pour la marche aléatoire et le mouvement brownien, d'après Dembo, Peres, Rosen, Zeitouni, Seminaire Bourbaki, No. 951, 2005