Accomplished Iranian Americans

(in alphabetical order)

Anousheh Ansari recently became the first Iranian woman in space and the first female “space tourist” by going to the orbit aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. Before that, she and her husband helped make aviation history. The two successful flights of the privately funded “SpaceShipOne” into orbit (100 km or 62 miles up), which made the possibility of space tourism into a potential reality, were in large part motivated by the $10 million dollar “Ansari X Prize.” Entrepreneurs Anousheh and husband Amir Ansari were the top contributors to this important cause, which made history in terms of the aforementioned flight. The Time magazine recently named SpaceShipOne the “Invention of the Year” for reviving dreams of space flight for ordinary people.

Anousheh Ansari is a trustee of the X Prize Foundation and a successful entrepreneur in the world of high tech industry. She is the Co-Founder of Prodea, Inc. and was previously General Manager and VP of the IntelligentIP division of Sonus Networks, formed in January 2001 through Sonus' acquisition of Telecom Technologies, Inc. (TTI). Ms. Ansari founded TTI, a supplier of softswitch-based solutions for network and service providers offering end-to-end solutions for next generation, carrier-grade multi-service networks, in 1993, and as its CEO, turned it into a force in the telecommunication industry. She was listed in the prestigious Forbes 40 under 40 in 2001, and recognized by Working Woman magazine as the winner of the 2000 National Entrepreneurial Excellence award. Ms. Ansari holds a Master of Science Degree in Electrical Engineering from George Washington University and a Bachelor of Science Degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from George Mason University. She is also a member of Eta Kappa Nu, IEEE and NSPE. Please check the following links for more information:

Anousheh Ansari.com

Space.com interview

Wikipedia entry

Ansari X Prize: (as described in its President’s message)

Anousheh Ansari: (Full Bio-sketch)

Ansari X Prize (homepage)

The SpaceShipOne (Project’s homepage)

Time magazine (Invention of the Year)

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Nima Arkani-Hamed is a particle physicist currently affiliated with the Institute for Advanced Study. Please check the following links for more information about him:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nima_Arkani-Hamed

http://www.ias.edu/about/faculty-and-emeriti/arkani-hamed

http://www.physics.harvard.edu/people/facpages/arkani-hamed.html

http://www.groundreport.com/Health_and_Science/Nima-Arkani-Hamed-Interprets-the-Universe

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Omid Kordestani is Google’s senior vice president for global sales and business development. Please check the following links for more information about him:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omid_Kordestani

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1187475,00.html

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Maryam Mirzakhani is a young mathematician who currently lives in America. She grew up in Iran and obtained her BSc from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, the Iranian capital. She became internationally known after receiving gold medals in both the 1994 International Mathematical Olympiad in Hong Kong (score 41/42) and the 1995 International Mathematical Olympiad in Canada 1995 (perfect score 42/42). She holds a PhD from Harvard University (2004), where she worked under the supervision of the Fields Medalist Curtis McMullen of Harvard University. She is a Clay Mathematics Institute Research Fellow and an assistant professor at Princeton University. Please check the following links for more information about her:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maryam_Mirzakhani

http://www.imo-official.org/participant_r.aspx?id=926

http://www.claymath.org/fas/research_fellows/Mirzakhani/

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/2005-09-13-brilliant-minds_x.htm

http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2006-07/popscis-fourth-annual-brilliant-10?page=7

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Pierre Omidyar, an entrepreneur and philanthropist was born in France to Iranian parents. He moved to the USA at the age of 6 and grew up in Washington, DC. He is best known as the founder of the online auction site eBay which he did when he was 28. The site was launched on Labor Day, Monday, September 4 1995, under the more prosaic title of "Auction Web"; it was hosted on a site Omidyar had created for information on the Ebola virus. Auction Web was later renamed "eBay", after Omidyar's consulting firm Echo Bay when "echobay.com" was unavailable. The service was free at first, but started charging in order to cover Internet service provider costs. His financial net worth is estimated at 8 billion dollars. He later founded the “Omidyar Network” a philanthropic investment firm that is committed to creating and fostering opportunity for people around the world. The organization makes investments in and provides grants to likeminded organizations to support and maximize the impacts of their social efforts. As an extension of Omidyar Network's activities in microfinance, in 2005, Omidyar and his wife Pam gave $100 million to his alma mater Tufts University to create the “Omidyar-Tufts Microfinance Fund.” Their endowment gift, the single largest in the history of Tufts, is aimed at accelerating growth in the microfinance sector and is being invested solely in microfinance initiatives. Today, Mr. Omidyar serves as a trustee of Tufts University, Punahou School and Santa Fe Institute, a director of Meetup, and chairman of eBay Inc. Please check the following links for more information on Mr. Omidyar and his varied accomplishments:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Omidyar

http://www.omidyar.net/

http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/omi0bio-1

http://www.tufts.edu/microfinancefund/

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Cumrun Vafa is a leading string theorist and currently a professor of theoretical physics at Harvard University. Please check the following links for more information about him:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumrun_Vafa

http://www.physics.harvard.edu/people/facpages/vafa.html

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Saba Valadkhan, a young scientist at the Case Western Reserve university, solves the “the riddle of the spliceosome” that had baffled scientists for decades. Her discovery holds promise for understanding and treatment of Alzheimer’s, cancer and other diseases with a genetic component. She has been named as the winner of 2004 Young Scientist Award, a $25,000 prize sponsored by GE Healthcare and Science magazine. Please check the following links for more information about her:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saba_Valadkhan

Science News Archive

http://www.payvand.com/news/05/aug/1088.html

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Ali “Al” Yeganeh, was the inspiration in an episode of the TV sitcom “Seinfeld” behind the “Soup Nazi” character, an unforgiving soup seller in Manhattan, New York. Although this episode made him famous (or infamous?) he was not happy with the episode. In real life, Yeganeh is the creator of “Soup Kitchen International” which in addition to selling soups (frozen in boxes) to supermarkets also has franchises in several American and Canadian cities. The soups are made in his industrial kitchen in Linden, New Jersey. The more than 50 franchises throughout the country are provided with some 45 soup varieties in 8-lb bags available in rotation. Chains participating in sub-franchising the soups include Ranch*1 and Cold Stone Creamery. Yeganeh was born in Iran and had lived in the city of Khorramshahr, Iran, prior to moving to the US. Please check the following links for more information on Mr. Yeganeh:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soup_Kitchen_International

http://www.originalsoupman.com/

http://www.iranian.com/Mar96/Features/Ashpazbashi.html

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,133182,00.html

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Lotfi Zadeh is most famous as the father of “fuzzy logic” following the publication of his seminal 1965 paper on fuzzy sets. Currently a professor of computer science at University of California at Berkley, he is internationally known in the areas of computer science, engineering and mathematics. Prof. Zadeh is a Fellow of the IEEE and a recipient of the 1973 IEEE Education Medal, the 1992 IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal, and an IEEE Centennial Medal. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Foreign Member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, a fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the American Association for Artificial Intelligence.  He was awarded the IEEE Medal of Honor in 1995 “For pioneering development of fuzzy logic and its many diverse applications.” Please check the following links for more information about Professor Zadeh and his many and varied accomplishments:

UC Berkley internet homepage

IEEE "legacies"

Wikipedia entry

A short biography by Betty Blair

The Paula Gordon Show

Fuzzy logic: A tutorial

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