3 Iranian among top 100 living geniuses

Top 100 living geniuses

Dr. Ali Javan from MIT is ranked 12.
Dr. Nima Arkani-Hamed (Canadian Iranian) from Harvard University is listed as Canadian and is ranked 32.
Dr. Pardis Saberi from Broad Institute Director Eric Lander's laboratory is ranked 49

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/10/28/geniustable128.xml


The top 100 living geniuses were compiled by a panel of six experts in creativity and
innovation from Creators Synectics, a global consultants firm.
Each genius was then awarded scores out of ten against criteria which included: paradigm
shifting; popular acclaim; intellectual power; achievement and cultural importance. So:
It is with honor that two Iranians are listed here: they are Professor Ali Javan, currently
the Wight Davis Professor Emeritus of Physics at MIT, founder of first major research
center in the field of lasers? Ranked 12 and Dr. Pardis Sabeti, Biological anthropologist,
Ranked 49.
 
Ali Javan was born in Iran in 1926, is an inventor and physicist at MIT.
He co-invented the gas laser in 1960, with William R. Bennett. He graduated from Alborz
High School, started his university studies at University of Tehran and continued at
Columbia University after coming to the United States in 1948. He received his Ph.D. in
physics in 1954. He joined the research staff of Bell Telephone Laboratories in
Murray Hill, New Jersey in September, 1958. In 1961, Professor Javan joined
Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an associate professor of physics and has been a
professor since 1964.
 
Pardis Sabeti earned her master's degree in human biology, and her
doctorate in biological anthropology at The University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar where
she specialized in genetic diversity and contributed articles to Encarta Africana, Genes and
Immunity and Nature. She will shortly complete her M.D. at Harvard Medical School, and
plans a career in academic medicine and research. Sabeti was born in Iran in 1975. She
arrived in the US at age 2 and now resides in Orlando; Fla. Sabeti plays guitar and bass
and is the lead singer of a rock band.
As a young scientist and medical student, Broad researcher Pardis Sabeti combined her
passions for scientific research and medicine into a singular goal: to gain a deeper
understanding of disease by decoding the evolutionary history that is recorded within DNA.
Now, her pioneering steps toward this goal have earned prominent awards from two
world-class organizations: summa cum laude graduation honors from Harvard Medical
School and a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award.
Sabeti, currently a postdoctoral researcher in Broad Institute Director Eric Lander's
laboratory, conducted portions of her previous doctoral work here at the Broad. While
pursuing her graduate research into the genetic factors that predispose humans to
infectious diseases, she herself was bitten by a "bug" of sorts: Sabeti longed to become an
infectious disease physician. In particular, she sought to address the medical needs of
developing countries, which are often ravaged by communicable diseases, including
malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and others. Thus, she enrolled in medical school.

3rd Iranian among geniuses has been listed as Canadian because presently he is citizen of Canada.
Nima Arkani-Hamed (Iranian-Canadian)
Nima Arkani-Hamed was born in 1972 in the U.S. to Iranian parents (also physicists) and became a Canadian citizen.
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 Ph.D in 1997 and went to SLAC for post-doctoral studies. During this time he worked with Savas Dimopoulos and this is when the idea of large extra dimensions emerged. 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 in the spring 2001. Shortly after arriving at Harvard he worked with Howard Georgi and Andrew Cohen on idea of emergent extra dimensions, dubbed 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 programmes and newspapers talking about space, time and dimensions and the current state of theoretical physics. In the summer of 2005 while at Harvard he won the 'Phi Beta Kappa' award for teaching excellence.
Nima Arkani-Hamed participated in the Stock Exchange of Visions project in 2007.
Currently, he is a Professor of Physics at Harvard University. He will join the Faculty at the Institute for Advanced Study, effective January 1, 2008.
The son of two Iranian physicists, Arkani-Hamed was born in Houston, Texas, and grew up in Boston. After the Iranian revolution of 1979, his family returned to their homeland, but as religious fundamentalists took over the government, his father was forced to go underground and the family eventually had to flee across the border to Turkey. By 1982, Nima was living in Toronto, Canada.
Recalling his early life, Arkani-Hamed says that his time in Iran was largely a positive experience. "The strange thing is that I have mostly wonderful memories," he says. If anything, he adds, it taught him to worry less about what others thought of him. "Given that so many aspects of my life have been unusual, I've never had a problem with feeling different or being different or doing different things."
Best regards
Manouchehr Gojgini

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