By Michael Tegos
Anousheh Ansari is a computer scientist, an entrepreneur, and the first Muslim woman to go to space – not to mention the first woman to do so using her own funds. I caught up with her much closer to the ground, in Singapore, where she flew in to support the UN Women Singapore Committee for ending violence against women.
Stargazer
Going to space was Anousheh’s life-long dream, along with becoming an astrophysicist. Growing up in her homeland, Iran, she would lie in her balcony and get lost in the night skies, dreaming she would one day be among the stars. “I was fascinated by the sheer mystery of space, what’s out there, what’s it like, and how I could get there,” she says.
The stars looked pretty far away in 1984, five years after the Iranian revolution, when she and her family left the country for a better life in the United States. There she studied electrical engineering and computer science. After meeting her husband, Hamid Ansari, she went into the telecommunications business. Together, they founded telecommunications company Telecom Technologies in 1993.
Categories: Arab World, Asia, Iran, Science, Space Exploration, Women
Hi, thank you for the great post. Iran has a lot of very interesting and successful women:
http://theotheriran.com/tag/women/
They are a good example that also in the Muslim world women can take on all kinds of challenges and be successful. Of course they must get space and freedom so that they can use their potentials.