Maryam Mirzakhani Receives 2013 AMS Satter Prize

Providence, RI---Maryam Mirzakhani, Professor of Mathematics at Stanford University, is receiving the 2013 AMS Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize. Presented every two years by the American Mathematical Society, the Satter Prize recognizes an outstanding contribution to mathematics research by a woman in the preceding five years. The prize will be awarded on Thursday, January 10, 2013, at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Diego.

Mirzakhani is honored for "her deep contributions to the theory of moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces." Highlighted as one of the "Brilliant Ten" byPopular Science magazine in 2005, Mirzakhani is the recipient of the Blumenthal Award (2005) and a Clay Mathematics Institute Fellowship (2004-2008).

Source : American Mathematical Society

Diaspora | Community (Re)Defined: Hailing Successes, Recognizing Failures

Reflections on ten years working for the Iranian American community.

Ramin Bajoghli is the President of the Board of Advisors of Iranian Alliances Across Borders (IAAB), a non-profit organization that seeks to strengthen the Iranian diaspora community through leadership and educational programming. All opinions are his own.

[ opinion ] The all too common Iranian American myth goes something like this: we are the wealthiest, smartest, most successful diaspora community in the United States.
Unfortunately, by perpetuating this myth, we ignore or refuse to acknowledge the very serious challenges facing the Iranian American community.

In the last decade, various national organizations and numerous individuals have worked tirelessly to combat the racist and misrepresentative images of Iranians in mainstream media. The 1979-81 Iran hostage crisis created a wave of anti-Iranian sentiment that in some measure continues to linger today. In response, many in the Iranian American community have sought to take control of its public image. However, the narrative we've created for ourselves is one of extreme levels of success: we are not the bearded and veiled religious fanatics of yesteryear, but instead, we demand recognition as the CEOs, bankers, scientists, doctors, lawyers, and engineers pioneering the United States in the 21st century.

Although our successes in the United States need to be celebrated, we are treading a treacherous slope with our narrow definition of success. As with any community, our socioeconomic conditions are diverse. The real difficulties faced by our community are not a matter of public relations and image; instead the complications emerge from one of exclusivity. We are marginalizing scores of our own who do not fit this golden image of success.

Socioeconomic issues are not the only barrier Iranian Americans need to recognize and address. Problems of mental illness, health and disability issues, domestic violence, racism, sexism, and homophobia are very real and occur daily in our community. Without an honest and open debate on these issues, Iranian Americans will never stand on a par with other successful diaspora communities. A serious study of said communities reveals a common characteristic sorely lacking among Iranian Americans: each diaspora community -- Jewish, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Armenian, Arab, etc. -- provides resources and social services to those in need.

Having spoken with leaders of these various communities over the past decade, three common elements in building a powerful and active diaspora community emerged: (1) take care of your own (the poor, the sick -- anyone in need); (2) be active and participate in domestic policy issues; and (3) once significant ground has been gained on the first two, enter and sway foreign policy debates.

A successful diaspora community is one that celebrates the triumphs of all its members, regardless of profession, and comes to the aid of those in need. We must learn that individual success does not equal community prosperity. At this critical juncture for our community, it's the only responsible way forward.

As Iranian Americans, we love to cite the oft-quoted Saadi poem that adorns the entrance of the United Nations.

Ironically, it seems, we never heed Saadi's words when it comes to our own.

Human beings are members of a whole,
In creation of one essence and soul.


If one member is afflicted with pain,
Other members uneasy will remain.


If you have no sympathy for human pain,
The name of human you cannot retain.

Copyright © 2012 Tehran Bureau


Source: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tehranbureau/2012/12/opinion-community-redefined-hailing-successes-recognizing-failures.html#ixzz2Eg97OgJf

Introducing Successful Iranian Americans : Nima Arkani Hamed

Nima Arkani-Hamed (born 5 April 1972) is an Iranian/American  theoretical physicist with interests in high-energy physics, string theory and cosmology. Formerly a professor at Harvard, Arkani-Hamed is now on the faculty at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. His parents were both Iranian physicists. His father is Professor Jafar Arkani-Hamed, who used to chair the physics department at Tehran's Sharif University of Technology and who is now currently emeritus professor of earth and planetary sciences at McGill University in Montreal .

Arkani-Hamed graduated from the University of Toronto with a Joint Honours degree in Mathematics and Physics, and went to the University of California, Berkeley for his graduate studies, where he worked under the supervision of Lawrence Hall. He completed his PhD in 1997 and went to SLAC at Stanford University for post-doctoral studies. During this time he worked with Savas Dimopoulos on large extra dimensions.

In 1999 he joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley physics department. He took a leave of absence from Berkeley to visit Harvard University beginning January 2001. Shortly after arriving at Harvard he worked with Howard Georgi and Andrew Cohen on the idea of emergent extra dimensions, dubbed dimensional deconstruction. These ideas eventually led to the development of little Higgs theories.

He officially joined Harvard's faculty in the fall of 2002. Arkani-Hamed has appeared on various television programs and newspapers talking about space, time and dimensions and the current state of theoretical physics. In 2003 he won the Gribov Medal of the European Physical Society, and in the summer of 2005 while at Harvard he won the 'Phi Beta Kappa' award for teaching excellence.

Arkani-Hamed participated in the Sto oject in 2007. In 2008 Arkani-Hamed won the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize given at Tel Aviv University to young scientists who have made outstanding and fundamental contributions in Physical Science.

He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009. In 2010 Arkani-Hamed gave the Messenger lectures at Cornell University.

He was a Professor of Physics at Harvard University from 2002–2008, and is now a Faculty member of the Institute for Advanced Study.

Introducing Successful Iranian Americans : Siavash Alamouti

Siavash Alamouti  is an Iranian-American engineer who is best known for the invention of the so-called Alamouti space–time block code, filed in 1997 and patented jointly with Vahid Tarokh. Alamouti's code is a 2 transmit antenna space-time block code and has been adopted in various global standards. Formerly an Intel Fellow and the CTO of Mobile Wireless Group at Intel Corp., since March 2010 he is the Group R&D Director for the global mobile operator Vodafone. 
In 2002, the IEEE Communications Society recognized him as the author of one of the 57 most important papers in all society's transactions during the past 50 years.

Siavash M. Alamouti received the B.S. and the M.Sc. degrees in electrical engineering from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, in 1989 and 1991, respectively.

He was an Intel Fellow in the Mobility Group and chief technology officer of the Mobile Wireless Group, responsible for all wireless standards with a product roadmap at Intel. This includes the WiMAX Forum, IEEE 802.16, 3GPP, OMA, WiFi Alliance and IEEE 802.11. He was also known as the technical champion of WiMAX technology at Intel.

Prior to joining Intel in 2004, Alamouti worked for Vivato, Inc., Cadence Design Systems, AT&T Wireless Services and MPR Teltech Ltd. in various engineering roles.

Alamouti holds over 20 patents in the areas of wireless communication applications and wireless systems design. He has authored many publications and technical reports in the last decade for the IEEE Communications Society and other organizations that have reached professional audiences both nationally and internationally.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siavash_Alamouti

Introducing Successful Iranian Americans : Shahriar Afshar

Shahriar Sadigh Afshar  is an Iranian-American physicist and a multiple award-winning inventor. He is known for devising and carrying out the Afshar experiment at Harvard University in 2004. As of July 2004, Afshar is a Visiting Research Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Rowan University.His highest academic degree is B.S.He is a member of the high IQ society Mensa International.

Afshar's experiment is an optical experiment, which is claimed to demonstrate a contradiction of the principle of complementarity in quantum mechanics. As a result of the controversy surrounding claims made about the experiment, Afshar complained that he has been attacked over his religion and ethnicity.These personal attacks drew a rebuke in a New Scientist editorial, which called them "extreme", and an "entirely wrong kind of conflict".
More recently Afshar has been concentrating on his commercial interests, as President, CEO & CTO of Immerz Inc, a Cambridge MA startup, in the consumer electronics games field. His award-winning invention KOR-fx is considered to be the next step towards full media immersion and in his interviews with CNN and Bloomberg TV, it has been called "4D technology", as a follow on to the recent success of 3D entertainment.

On November 18, 2009, on the eve of LHC's launch, Afshar announced a wager against LHC being able to find the Higgs Boson in a New Scientist commentary, and Popular Science award article offering instead his own theory on the origin of inertia. The discovery of the Higgs boson was announced on July 4, 2012 by CERN scientists, which leaves Afshar on the losing side of Higgs bet. (Actually, the evidence at CERN suggests the Higgs, but few reputable physicists have called it completely dispositive as of yet. Certainly, the Director of CERN has not. From the New York Times, "I think we have it,” said Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the director general of CERN, the multinational research center headquartered in Geneva. The agency is home to the Large Hadron Collider, the immense particle accelerator that produced the new data by colliding protons. The findings were announced by two separate teams. Dr. Heuer called the discovery 'a historic milestone.' He and others said that it was too soon to know for sure, however, whether the new particle is the one predicted by the Standard Model, the theory that has ruled physics for the last half-century.)
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahriar_Afshar

Introducing Successful Iranian Americans : Dr. Abbas Alavi

Abass Alavi is Professor of Radiology and Neurology. He is currently the Director of Research Education in the Division of Nuclear Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Abass Alavi is a pioneer in nuclear medicine having a CV comprising over 660 peer-reviewed publications.
He is recipient of many awards and distinctions, among which are the highest distinction in nuclear medicine, the Georg Charles de Hevesy Nuclear Pioneer Award given by the Society of Nuclear Medicine, the Cassen Prize of the Society of Nuclear Medicine, and honorary degrees from the University of Bologna, the University of the Sciences in Philadelphia and the University of Shiraz in Iran. In 2004, Alavi was awarded the Georg Charles von Hevesy Award from the Society of Nuclear Medicine for his pioneering work in the development of positron emission tomography. He is an internationally renowned expert in the modern imaging sciences and in the clinical applications of PET imaging for the detection of cancer as well as neurological, cardiovascular, and infectious disorders.
Biography Prof. Alavi received his medical degree from the University of Tehran and joined the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in 1971 as a research fellow in nuclear medicine after completing his education in internal medicine, hematology and radiology. He soon thereafter was appointed to U Penn faculty where he currently holds appointments as Professor and Director of Research Education, Department of Radiology. He is also Medical Director of the Positron Emission Tomography (PET) Center at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Professor Alavi began his work in PET in the 1970’s, and is recognized as an innovator in this field. He has made contributions to the field of modern medical imaging, including the introduction of 18FDG-Positron_emission_tomography (PET) with his colleagues. He and his colleagues have conducted pioneering research in modern imaging techniques including PET, SPECT, CT and MRI. He is an expert in modern imaging techniques and the clinical applications of PET imaging for the detection of cancer and other disorders including dementia, seizures, cardiovascular disease, and infection. He served as a member and chairman of scientific study sections at the NIH and American Cancer Society. He has published numerous scientific papers, and is the most cited faculty member at U Penn. He is a educator, and his former students and research fellows now occupy positions in Nuclear Medicine worldwide. He has been a long-time supporter of educational and research opportunities for students in nuclear medicine. While his name is associated with the Alavi-Mandell Awards, which recognize trainees and young scientists who publish articles as senior authors in the Journal of Nuclear Medicine, his generosity also supports the Pilot Research Grants and the Bradley-Alavi Student Fellowship Awards funded by the Education and Research Foundation of the Society of Nuclear Medicine.

Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abass_Alavi