Prof. Viktor Amazaspovich Ambartsumian

Viktor Amazaspovich Ambartsumian (1908 –1996) was a Soviet Armenian astrophysicist and science administrator. One of the 20th century's top astronomers, he is widely regarded as the founder of theoretical astrophysics in the Soviet Union.

Educated at Leningrad State University (LSU) and the Pulkovo Observatory, Ambartsumian taught at LSU and founded the Soviet Union's first department of astrophysics there in 1934. He subsequently moved to Soviet Armenia, where he founded the Byurakan Observatory in 1946. It became his institutional base for the decades to come and a major center of astronomical research. He also co-founded the Armenian Academy of Sciences and led it for almost half a century—the entire post-war period. One commentator noted that "science in Armenia was synonymous with the name Ambartsumian." In 1965 Ambartsumian founded the journal Astrofizika and served as its editor for over 20 years.

Ambartsumian began retiring from the various positions he held only from the age of 80. He died at his house in Byurakan and was buried on the grounds of the observatory. He was declared a National Hero of Armenia in 1994.

Prof. Seyed Hussain Mirshamsi

Father of vaccines in Iran, after graduating in the field of veterinary science from Tehran university in the years 1950-1951, he received his Ph.D. in the veterinary field from Alfred university affiliate to Paris university of veterinary. He also graduated from New York health Institute in the field of virology and from then on, he joined the London Medical Research Council taking part in a research work for producing vaccines for measles, polio, mumps, and pox. As representative of World health Organization, he was responsible for operating vaccine production line in different countries such as Jordan and Tunisia in the Middle East working in the biologic standardization committee affiliated to WHO

Prof. Joseph Hooton Taylor Jr.

Joseph Hooton Taylor Jr. (born March 29, 1941) is an American astrophysicist and Nobel Prize laureate in Physics for his discovery with Russell Alan Hulse of a "new type of pulsar, a discovery that has opened up new possibilities for the study of gravitation."

Prof. Acharia Jagdish Jandra Bose

Jandra was graduated from Calcutta University, India and later continued in London University studying medicine. After some while, he abandoned his studies due to illness but continued his research in Cambridge with Lord Rilly the Nobel Laureate. He later returned to India and taught physics at Calcutta University. He developed a coherer device which was for radio waves. Moreover, he is renowned for his activities in radio invention and communication and biophysics. The World Association of Electronic and Electricity Engineers have named her as the pioneer of radio science. He is also known as the father of sci-fi in Bengal. He is the first from India peninsular to have acquired a US patent in 1904

Prof. Mohammad Gharib

Father of Pediatrics in Iran is among the first physicians who specialized as the pediatrician in Iran and was the founder of the modern pediatrician as well as the founder of a special hospital for children. In 1917 Dr. Gharib went to France to continue his studies in medicine and he returned home in 1928 working as a professor in Medical College of Tehran University. Later he opened pediatrician college and remained its chancellor for the rest of his life. He co-founded a pediatrician center with Dr. Hassan Ahari as the first ever children’s hospital in Iran which is one of the most important scientific attempts in his life. He was awarded the top medal for his highly valuable services and the first rank medal from Ministry of Education as well as the medal of Legion d’Honeur from the Government of France

Prof. Gholamhussein Mosaheb

The celebrated and distinguished Iranian mathematician was born in Tehran in 1911. His undergraduate studies in mathematics were conducted in Tehran and Paris (1928-31) and he obtained his Ph.D. in mathematics from Cambridge University in 1948.

Three colossal and everlasting achievements of Dr. Mossaheb which keep his memory immortal are 1) Founding and editing the "Persian Encyclopedia”. This is the first Persian Encyclopedia written on the basis and methodology of internationally accepted norms (1955); 2) Founding and managing the "Mathematical Institute” at Daneshsarayeh Aali (1965). Many of the present professors of mathematics in Iran are the graduates of this Institute; 3) In his quest for the enrichment of the Persian language with scientific terms; he created with the collaboration of a group of noted scholars an extensive repository of scientific terminology in Persian.

Prof. Omar Yaghi

 Jordanian Chemist and the 2015 Mustafa Prize Laureate

Omar M. Yaghi was born in Amman, Jordan on 09 February 1965. He received his formal training at the State University of New York-Albany (B.S. degree, 1985), University of Illinois-Urbana (Ph.D. degree, 1990), and Harvard University (NSF Postdoctoral Fellow, 1990-92).

Professor Yaghi is the James and Neeltje Tretter Chair Professor of Chemistry at University of California, Berkeley, and a Senior Faculty Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is the Founding Director of the Berkeley Global Science Institute and serves as the Co-Director of the Kavli Energy NanoScience Institute as well as the California Research Alliance by BASF.

Prof. Yaghi was selected as the Mustafa Prize Laureate in the field of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology in 2015, for his outstanding work on "Porous Metal-Organic Frameworks”.

Prof. Jackie Yi-Ru Ying 

 2015 Mustafa Prize Laureate in Bio Nanotechnology

Born: 1966

Nationality: Singapore

She won the prize for her outstanding contributions to the " synthesis of well-designed advanced nanostructured materials and systems”, nanostructured biomaterials and miniaturized bio-systems of various interesting applications including the development of "stimuli-responsive polymeric nanoparticles” for diabetic patients.

Prof. Jackie Yi-Ru Ying won the prize for research she has made a major impact in the field of nanostructured materials through major breakthrough in the synthesis of nanoparticles, nanocomposites and nonporous materials. She has created a nano tool box that is successfully applied towards drug delivery, cell and tissue engineering, biosensors and diagnostics, pharmaceuticals synthesis, green chemistry and energy. 

Prof. M. Amin Shokrollahi

The 2017 Mustafa Prize Laureate in Information Theory

Born: 1964

Nationality: Iranian

The 2017 Mustafa Prize in Information Theory was awarded to Prof. M. Amin Shokrollahi in recognition of his outstanding work on Communications: Raptor Codes. The world's most advanced forward error correction (FEC) code for data networks, Raptor codes invented by Shokrollahi in 2001, provide protection against packet loss by sending additional repair data used to reconstruct "erased" or "lost" data.

Over a period of 10 years, Prof. Shokrollahi designed and implemented various versions of his Raptor codes for many different information distribution applications including video streaming and delivery of data to mobile devices.

Prof. Sami Erol Gelenbe

The 2017 Mustafa Prize Laureate in Information and Communication Science and Technology

Nationality: Turkish

Born: 1945

 The 2017 Mustafa Prize in Information and Communication Science and Technology was awarded to Prof. Sami Erol Gelenbe for his pioneering research on "Modeling and Performance Evaluation of Computer Systems.”

Sami Erol Gelenbe is a Turkish computer scientist, electronic engineer and applied mathematician who is a member of the Science Academy of Turkey (Bilim Academisi), and holds the "Dennis Gabor” professorship in Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College, London. After a childhood spent in Istanbul and Alexandria (Egypt), he graduated from Ankara College in 1962 and the Middle East Technical University in 1966, winning the K.K. Clarke Research Award for work on "partial flux switching magnetic memory systems". He continued at Polytechnic University (now part of New York University), earning a master's degree and a PhD thesis on "Stochastic automata with structural restrictions”. 

Prof. Uğur Şahin

Uğur Şahin (1965) is a German oncologist and immunologist. He is the founder and CEO of BioNTech, which developed one of the major vaccines against COVID-19. His main fields of research are cancer research and immunology.

Şahin's family, originally from Turkey, moved to Germany when he was four years old. He grew up in Cologne and studied medicine at the University of Cologne, completing a doctoral thesis there in cancer immunotherapy. He initially remained in academia, in patient care as an oncohematology physician and conducting research at university hospitals in Saarland and Zürich. He founded a research group at the University of Mainz in 2000 and became a professor of experimental oncology in 2006.

In 2001, while maintaining his position at the University of Mainz, Şahin began to engage in entrepreneurial activities, co-founding two pharmaceutical companies, in 2001 and 2008, with his partner and spouse Özlem Türeci. The second of these companies, BioNTech, together with Pfizer Inc, developed one of the major vaccines used to fight the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. As a result of the company's increase in value, Şahin and Türeci became the first Germans with Turkish roots among Germany's 100 wealthiest people.

Prof. Ali Khademhosseini

Ali Khademhosseini (1975, Tehran, Iran) is the CEO of the Terasaki Institute, non-profit research organization in Los Angeles, and Omeat Inc., a cultivated-meat startup. Before taking his current CEO roles, he spent one year at Amazon Inc. Prior to that he was the Levi Knight chair and professor at the University of California-Los Angeles where he held a multi-departmental professorship in Bioengineering, Radiology, Chemical, and Biomolecular Engineering as well as the Director of Center for Minimally Invasive Therapeutics (C-MIT). From 2005 to 2017, he was a professor at Harvard Medical School, and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.

He is an academic entrepreneur who has made contributions in biomaterials and regenerative medicine, particular for developing hydrogels for tissue engineering and bioprinting. He has started multiple companies, including Obsidio Inc. (sold to Boston Scientific) and Omeat Inc.

His studies have been cited over 115,000 times (H index = 175).

 Every year since 2014 he has been selected by Thomson Reuters as one of the World's Most Influential Minds. By the number of citations, he is the most cited author of in various journals in the field of biomaterials like Biomaterials, Advanced Healthcare Materials, Bio fabrication, Tissue Engineering.

Prof. Umran S. Inan

Umran Savaş İnan (1950) is a Turkish scientist at Koç University and Stanford University in the field of geophysics and very low frequency radio science. İnan was the president of Koç University between 2009 and 2021.

Inan has been active member of various organizations since 1973 and he has been awarded by many institutions so far. Besides being a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the International Radio Science Association, the American Physical Society (APS), the Electromagnetic Academy, the Academy of Tau Beta Pi, the Sigma Xi Academy, and TUBA, İnan was also awarded by Aeronautics and Space Administration NASA with group achievement award in years 1983, 1998 and 2004.

Prof. Hossein Baharvand

Hossein Baharvand is a distinguished Professor of Royan Institute, where he firstly joined in 1995. He received his B.Sc. in Biology from Shiraz University in 1994, and M.Sc. in Developmental Biology from Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran in 1996. He received his Ph.D. in Cell and Developmental Biology from Khwarizmi University (formerly Tarbiat Moallem University) in 2004. In 2012, he became Professor at Royan institute. He is also appointed as the head of department of Developmental Biology at University of Science and Culture (2006-jan 2018). For the first time, he generated the mouse and human embryonic stem cells (2003) and induced pluripotent stem cells (2008) in Iran. This has enabled his team to pursue many avenues of research into translational research and regenerative medicine.

He is the founder and director of Royan Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Technology, where the institute is committed to cross-disciplinary partnerships and collaborations by biology, engineering, and medical academics to improve human health and life quality. Now, the institute includes 4 main departments named as Stem Cells and Developmental Biology, Regenerative Medicine, Cell Engineering and the newly established Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

He has given numerous tutorials and invited talks in many congresses. He is the editor of four international books which were published by Springer (2010 and 2012) and John Wiley, USA (2015). He has published 322 international and 102 national peer-reviewed papers, as well as seven chapters in international books, seven books in Persian, and eight translated English text books into Persian. Eight figures of his peer-reviewed publications were selected as cover pages of international journals. As of March. 2018, Google Scholar reports over 8000 citations and h-index 45 to his work. He is currently the editorial board member of eight international journals (e.g., Journal of Biological Chemistry and Nature Scientific Reports).

Prof. Mohammad Abdolahad

Professor "Mohammed Abdolahad" is an Iranian scientist who has many achievements in the field of diagnosis and treatment of malignant diseases, including cancer. Among his most important achievements are the creation of a cancer detection device, a tumor detection device, etc.

Abdolahad's research path is mainly focused on cancer. He has made a great contribution in applying interdisciplinary topics in the society. In recent years, Abdolahad has received US patents for many of his inventions.

Together with his team, he has invented the cancer diagnostic test (PDC). PDC or device for detecting infected areas and lymph nodes involved in breast cancer is a real-time diagnosis system that is used as a complementary tool, along with frozen and permanent pathologies, to detect high-risk cancer cells in cancer areas of patients undergoing breast cancer surgery.

Another of Abdolahad 's inventions is the tumor diagnosis test (IPDT) device, which helps the radiologist to find out the condition of the mass in the patient's breast and the level of risk for the patient.

With this technology, you can quickly notice the beginning of the malignant process in the tumor, and in fact, this device helps the radiologist to detect any mass that needs surgery and inform the surgeon.

Prof. Cumrun Vafa

Cumrun Vafa's primary area of research is string theory.  String theory, a subject that is about four decades old, is at the center of efforts by theoretical physicists to find a unified fundamental theory of nature.  String theory provides a framework to unify everything we know about nature, including all particles and the forces between them, in a consistent quantum theory.  This is an ambitious goal, given that it aims to describe physical phenomena involving scales 1025 times smaller than the atom, as well as the cosmology of our entire universe, which involves a scale of about 1037 times bigger than the atom. In a single theory, one studies the mysteries of confinement of quarks inside atomic nuclei, as well as enigmatic properties of astrophysical objects such as black holes.

Such an all-encompassing theory necessarily requires a tremendous amount of mathematical technology.  In fact, most of the mathematics needed for string theory is not even yet developed.  String theorists thus have the exciting task of building new mathematics as tools to explore new laws of physics. It is therefore not surprising that string theory is at the cross roads of many fields, including mathematics, particle phenomenology and astrophysics. Cumrun Vafa's research has involved essentially all these aspects.  Together with his colleagues he has worked on topological strings, trying to elucidate some new mathematics originating from string theory (notably in his work on mirror symmetry) and using these techniques to uncover some of the mysteries of black holes, particularly the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy.  He has also applied these ideas to particle theories by geometrically engineering quantum field theories, as well as solving the strong coupling dynamics of confining theories (using large N matrix model technology) and geometrizing string theory defects (in a limit of string theory known as F-theory).  His recent work involves applying these ideas to come up with stringy predictions for the nature of the dark energy and the fate of our universe.

Prof. M. Zahid Hasan

M. Zahid Hasan is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics at Princeton University. His primary research area is quantum physics and quantum topology.

Hasan's research is focused on fundamental physics - either searching for, or in-depth exploration of novel phases of electronic quantum matter. He co-proposed and co-led the scattering-spectroscopy MERLIN beam-line and end-station facility at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. and developed a laboratory for ultrafast and coherent quantum phenomena at Princeton University.

Prof. Mohamed El. Sayegh

Prof.  Mohamed H. Sayegh is currently the Raja N. Khuri Dean of the Faculty of Medicine and Vice President of Medical Affairs at the American University of Beirut. He was appointed in this position in 2009. He was a Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School since 2003, and Director of the Schuster Family Transplantation Research Center at the Brigham and Women's Hospital and Boston Children's Hospital. In 2005, he was named the Warren E. Grupe and John P. Merrill Endowed Chair in Transplantation Medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Prof.  Sayegh is a world leader in transplantation, renal medicine and transplantation immunobiology research. In his field, he has made substantial and landmark contributions. He has published over 200 original articles in addition to a large number of reviews, editorials and book chapters. He has also edited several books in nephrology and transplantation.

Prof. Yahya Tayalati

Yahya Tayalati (1971) is a Moroccan Professor of Physics, University Mohammed V in Rabat. He works in the field "Observation of the Light by Light Scattering and the Search for Magnetic Monopoles”.  Tayalati involvement with ATLAS, the largest general-purpose particle detector experiment at LHC, goes back to the project’s early days. He spent twenty years of his career in ATLAS, covering many topics ranging from hardware projects and detector operations to software development and physics analysis and measurements. His first involvement was the ATLAS Liquid Argon Presampler, in which he has contributed to all steps related to the construction, commissioning, and operation of this subsystem. The Presampler, which is used for photons and electrons detection, has proven to be very efficient and it is now widely used in many ATLAS physics measurements.

One of the recent achievements of Tayalati and his colleagues in ATLAS collaboration was the observation of Light-by-light (LbyL) scattering for the first time in 2019. This process is completely forbidden in classical electrodynamics but appears in quantum electrodynamics. The LbyL scattering is an extremely rare process which makes its measurement very difficult and inaccessible.

Prof. Muhammad Iqbal Choudhary

Muhammad Iqbal Choudhary (1959) is a scientist in the field of organic chemistry from Pakistan. He is known for his research in various areas relating to natural product chemistry. He has more than 800 research publications. In 2015 he was recognized as the second most productive scientist in Pakistan.

He graduated with BSc from Karachi University later pursued his MSc in organic chemistry and then got his PhD in organic chemistry H.E.J. Research Institute of Chemistry located at Karachi University with thesis titled as "The Isolation and Structural Studies on Some Medicinal Plants of Pakistan, Buxus papillosa, Catharanthus roseus, and Cissampelos pareira." He did his post-doctoral studies at Cornell University, United States.