Zafar was elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) in 2007, after a nomination from the APS Forum on Industrial & Applied Physics, "for her contribution to the understanding of electrical degradation and charge transport mechanisms in high permittivity and SiO2 dielectric thin films, with a focus on advanced CMOS and memory device applications". She was elected as an IEEE Fellow in 2023, "for contributions to CMOS-compatible biosensors and high permittivity field effect transistor reliability models".