Many of the most important figures in Iranian political, academic, and social life have been associated with the University of Tehran. Notable press alumnus include
Hossein Towfigh, Editor-in-Chief of
Towfigh Magazine. Politicians include the nationalist leader
Mohammad Mosaddegh, Ayatollah
Mohammad Beheshti, former prime minister
Jamshid Amouzegar, and the recent reformist President
Mohammad Khatami. Academics include
Lotfi A. Zadeh the inventor of fuzzy logic, Fields Medal winner
Caucher Birkar,
Ali Javan who invented the gas laser and is ranked number 12 on the list of the top 100 living geniuses, intellectual and former prime minister
Mehdi Bazargan and biophysicist
Mohammad-Nabi Sarbolouki. Art figures include filmmakers
Abbas Kiarostami and
Asghar Farhadi, actor
Khosrow Shakibai and poet
Mohammad-Taqi Bahar. Other notable figures include Human Rights Lawyer
Shirin Ebadi who won the
Nobel Peace Prize in 2003, pioneering architect
Heydar Ghiai, prominent philosopher
Hossein Nasr, reformist cleric
Mehdi Karroubi, environmental activist
Mahlagha Mallah. Alumni from the University of Tehran's predecessor institutions the
Dar ul-Funun and the Tehran School of Political Sciences include linguist
Ali-Akbar Dehkhoda,
Baháʼí scholar
Mírzá Abu'l-Fadl and former prime ministers
Mohammad-Ali Foroughi and
Ali Amini. The School of Engineering at the University of Tehran has introduced recognized researchers all over the world, including:
Babak Hassibi: is an electrical engineer who is the Gordon M. Binder/Amgen Professor of
Electrical Engineering and Head of the Department of
Electrical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology (
Caltech). He received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Tehran in 1989, and the M.S. and PhD degrees in electrical engineering from
Stanford University in 1993 and 1996, respectively. At Stanford his adviser was
Thomas Kailath. He was a research associate in the Information Systems Laboratory at Stanford University during 1997-98 and was a member of the technical staff in the Mathematics of Communications Research Group at
Bell Laboratories in 1998–2000. Since 2001 he has been at Caltech.
Mohammad Reza Aref is a politician and academic scholar. He was
First Vice President from 2001 to 2005 under
Mohammad Khatami. He previously served as
Minister of Technology in Khatami's first
cabinet. He is currently a member of
Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution and
Expediency Discernment Council. He is also an electrical engineer and a professor at University of Tehran and
Sharif University of Technology. He was a candidate in the
2013 presidential election but withdrew his candidacy in order to give the
reformist camp a better chance to win.
Hamid Jafarkhani: is a chancellor's professor in
electrical engineering and
computer science at the
University of California, Irvine's
Henry Samueli School of Engineering. His research focuses on
communications theory, particularly
coding and
wireless communications and
networks. Prior to studying at the University of Tehran, he was ranked first in the nationwide entrance examination of
Iranian universities in 1984.
Kourosh Kalantar-zadeh: is an internationally recognized inventor (for his contributions to the field of ingestible sensors) and a distinguished professor at the
University of New South Wales.
Nader Engheta: is an
Iranian-
American scientist. He is currently the H. Nedwill Ramsey Professor at the
University of Pennsylvania,
Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, US, affiliated with the departments of Electrical and Systems Engineering, Bioengineering, and Physics and Astronomy.
Kaveh Pahlavan: is a professor of ECE and CS at the
Worcester Polytechnic Institute, he is renowned for his pioneering research in Wi-Fi Technology and wireless Indoor-Geolocation. and
body area networking. He is the Director of the Center for Wireless Information Network Studies at WPI.
Yahya Rahmat-Samii: is professor and holder of the
Northrop Grumman Chair in Electromagnetics at
Electrical Engineering Department at the
University of California, Los Angeles, where he teaches and conducts research on
microwave transmission and
radio antennas. He has made innovations in satellite communications antennas, personal communication antennas, wearable and implanted antennas for communications and biotelemetry, and antennas for remote sensing and radio astronomy applications. He is the Director of the UCLA Antenna Research, Analysis and Measurement Laboratory UCLA Antenna Research, Analysis, and Measurement Laboratory at Department of Electrical Engineering, UCLA. Alireza Mashaghi: is a physicist and biomedical scientist at
Harvard University and
Leiden University. He is the founder of parallel education programs in Iran and was the first dual-degree graduate of University of Tehran. Mashaghi is well known for single-molecule analysis of biomolecules, discovery of the mechanism of
Von Willebrand disease, the development of
circuit topology, and the use of statistical physics for medical diagnostics. He was named the discoverer of the year in 2017. Mashaghi has been affiliated with
Harvard University,
MIT,
ETH Zurich,
Delft University of Technology, and
Max Planck Institutes. He is an editorial board member of journals including
Nano Research and
Scientific Reports.
Alireza Nasiri is a technocrat and businessman who created Iran's first online degree program at University of Tehran in 2003. He is known as the father of commercial forestry in Iran due to empowering the field of greenery with genetically modified trees in Iran.
Lotfi A. Zadeh:is a mathematician, electrical engineer, computer scientist, artificial intelligence researcher and professor emeritus of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. Zadeh, in his theory of fuzzy sets, proposed using a membership function (with a range covering the interval [0,1]) operating on the domain of all possible values. He proposed new operations for the calculus of logic and showed that fuzzy logic was a generalisation of classical and Boolean logic. He also proposed fuzzy numbers as a special case of fuzzy sets, as well as the corresponding rules for consistent mathematical operations (fuzzy arithmetic). In 1942, he graduated from the University of Tehran with a degree in electrical engineering (Fanni). He has made significant contributions to the fields of
metamaterials,
transformation optics,
plasmonic optics,
nanophotonics,
graphene photonics, nano-materials, nanoscale optics,
nanoantennas and miniaturized
antennas, physics and reverse-engineering of polarization vision in nature, bio-inspired optical imaging, fractional paradigm in electrodynamics, and electromagnetics and microwaves. Some of the most prominent figures are named below:
Shirin Ebadi:is a lawyer, a former judge and human rights activist and founder of Defenders of Human Rights Center in Iran. On 10 October 2003, Ebadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her significant and pioneering efforts for democracy and human rights, especially women's, children's, and refugee rights. She was admitted to the law department of the University of Tehran in 1965 and in 1969, upon graduation, passed the qualification exams to become a judge. After a six-month internship period, she officially became a judge in March 1969. She continued her studies in University of Tehran in the meantime to pursue a master's degree in law in 1971.
Asghar Farhadi:is a film director and screenwriter. For his work as director, he has received one Golden Globe Award and one Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. He was named one of the 100 Most Influential People in the world by Time magazine in 2012. He is a graduate of theatre, with a BA in dramatic arts and MA in stage direction from University of Tehran and Tarbiat Modarres University, respectively.
Siavash Teimouri: is a high ranked Iranian architect and artist. He was born in Tehran, Iran. After getting his master from University of Tehran, faculty of fine arts in 1962, he then moved to Paris and received his PhD in architecture from École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in 1969. While working with top class architects he received the French Association of Architects's prize in 1967. He achieved the first place in design competition for University of Isfahan's faculty of science in 1973. He is a member of the French Society of Architects and also member of the board of trustees of the Iran Architectural Pride Worthies Foundation.
Mohammad Mosaddegh:was the prime minister of Iran from 1951 until being overthrown in a coup d'état in 1953. His administration introduced a wide range of social and political reforms but is most notable for its nationalization of the Iranian oil industry, which had been under British control since 1913 through the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC/AIOC) (later British Petroleum or BP). Mosaddegh received his Licence en Droit as well as his Doctor of law from the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland. Mosaddegh also taught at the University of Tehran at the start of World War I before beginning his long political career.
Ali Javan:is an Iranian American physicist and inventor at MIT. His main contributions to science have been in the fields of quantum physics and spectroscopy. 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 came to the United States in 1948 right after the war.
Mohammad Khatami:is an scholar, Shiite theologian, and Reformist politician. He served as the fifth President of Iran from 2 August 1997 to 3 August 2005. He also served as Iran's minister of culture in both the 1980s and 1990s. He is currently one of the leaders of the Iranian Green Movement, and an outspoken critic of the president Ahmadinejad's government. Khatami is known for his proposal of Dialogue Among Civilizations. The United Nations proclaimed the year 2001 as the United Nations' Year of Dialogue Among Civilizations, on Khatami's suggestion. Khatami received a B.A. in Western philosophy from Isfahan University, but left academia while studying for a master's degree in Educational Sciences at University of Tehran and went to Qom to complete his previous studies in Islamic sciences.
Seyed Ali Mirlohi Falavarjani, PhD graduate from the University of Tehran in 1975 and retired professor from University of Isfahan, founder of
Islamic Azad University of Falavarjanin 1984.
Mohammad Beheshti: was an scholar, writer, jurist, and one of the main architects of the constitution of the Islamic Republic in Iran. He was the secretary-general of the Islamic Republic Party, and the head of Iran's judicial system. He was assassinated together with more than seventy members of the Islamic Republic party on 28 June 1981. Beheshti was born in Isfahan and studied both at the University of Tehran and under Allameh Tabatabaei in Qom.
Mehdi Bazargan: was a prominent scholar, academic, long-time pro-democracy activist, and head of Iran's interim government, making him Iran's first prime minister after the Iranian Revolution of 1979. A well-respected religious intellectual, known for his honesty and expertise in the Islamic and secular sciences, he is credited with being one of the founders of the contemporary intellectual movement in Iran. He was the head of the first engineering department of the University of Tehran.
Bahram Sadeghi: writer. He studied medicine at University of Tehran.
Jamshid Amouzegar: economist, artist, and politician who was prime minister from 7 August 1977 to 27 August 1978 when he resigned. He was graduated with degrees in law and engineering from the University of Tehran.
Akbar Alemi:
television presenter and
documentary film director == International journals ==