Pioneer Women of Iranian Descent in World’s Science, Technology

There is a long list of Iranian women who have helped the advancement of science and technology. Here we have introduced seven of the most influential female scientists who have an Iranian descent:

Maryam Mirzakhani

Maryam Mirzakhani is an Iranian mathematician who worked in the US. Since 1 September 2008, she served as a professor of mathematics at Stanford University.

In 2014, Mirzakhani became both the first woman and the first Iranian honored with the Fields Medal, the most prestigious award in mathematics.

Mona Jarrahi

Born in Iran, professor Mona Jarrahi is one of Iran’s and also world’s most influential scientist, mathematician, physicist, and senior researcher and professors at the Terahertz Electronics Laboratory Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Professor Jarrahi is one of the youngest Assistant Professors at Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Parisa Tabriz

Parisa Tabriz born 1983 is an American computer security expert. Forbes included her in their “30 Under 30” list (30 Tech Pioneers under the age of 30) and she now works for Google as the self-appointed, Security Princess, and head of the team responsible for Chrome Security. She joined Google just a few months after graduation.

Anousheh Ansari

Anousheh Ansari (born September 12, 1966, in Mashhad, Iran) is an Iranian-American engineer and co-founder and chairwoman of Prodea Systems. Her previous business accomplishments include serving as co-founder and CEO of Telecom Technologies, Inc. 

In 2001 in a stock-for-stock transaction for 10.8 million shares of Sonus stock. Anousheh Ansari became “a vice president of Sonus and general manager of Sonus’ new INtelligentIP division.” In 2006, she co-founded Prodea Systems, and is the current chairman and CEO. Ansari was the fourth overall self-funded space traveler, and the first self-funded woman to fly to the International Space Station.

Manijeh Razeghi

Manijeh Razeghi is an Iranian-American scientist in the fields of semiconductors and optoelectronic devices. She is a pioneer in modern epitaxial techniques for semiconductors such as low pressure metalorganic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD), vapor phase epitaxy (VPE), molecular beam epitaxy (MBE), GasMBE, and MOMBE.

These techniques have enabled the development of semiconductor devices and quantum structures with higher composition consistency and reliability, leading to major advancement in InP and GaAs based quantum photonics and electronic devices, which were at the core of the late 20th century optical fiber telecommunications and early information technology.

Mina Bissell

Mina J. Bissell is an Iranian-American biologist known for her research on breast cancer. In particular, she has studied the effects of a cell's microenvironment, including its extracellular matrix, on tissue function.

Bissell and her colleague, William Ole Peterson, have developed 3D culture in cancer research. They have shown non-tumorgenic (normal-like) mammary epithelial cells form monolayer spherical acini with hollow lumen and tumorgenic mammary epithelial cells form filled bowl irregular acini. She has published about 300 articles and book chapters.

Laleh Haghverdi

Laleh Haghverdi received her PhD in Mathematics from the Technical University of Munich. She has a background in physics from Sharif University of Technology and has been working on single cell gene expression data analysis over the few past years.

Currently, she works at European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg (Huber Group & EMBL-EBI). The expert in single cell data analysis uses the modular architecture of gene regulatory networks and several gene interactions to develop a framework for accurate cell type recognition based on geometric deep learning.

4155/v