Victoria Umarji.

At the end of my research session at the University of Sydney, I met Samiya Ghanem. She was in the faculty of chemistry.

I asked Samiya if she knew any interesting, contemporary, non-chemist students in her department and she said: “Oh yeah! You know, those are my friends!”

Samiya is not a regular student by any means, but she gets to know a lot of interesting students thanks to her role as an advisor. One of them is Abderrahim Akash, a friend of mine. Abderrahim is one of those students that you would love to meet in person and it could be because you actually shared a laboratory and just got to know each other’s personalities. He is not there doing homework but is more a friend and social network than a teacher or instructor. I remember talking to him, once, one day in a café in Tehran because he is currently a postdoctoral fellow there, he was so nice, so funny… his energy in Iranian society is something you can’t describe.

He said: “I have been doing some research on the nuclear cycle, but I had no idea what would ever happen once you stop and look at things”. He was always one of those students that you knew it was possible to go where he needed to go, without that “knowing” what would be his next step. The following year I met him in a study group at the Polytechnic. While trying to understand how the nuclear fuel cycle works, he gave me a very interesting lecture about how the fuel cycle, in Iran, is actually quite easy, but the people are always behind closed doors or on desks: he says people have more time than they need and “the people on a desk do a job, but they don’t take a break”. In an ideal world I could have met him in Tehran.

I knew Ali Hamid Sadeghi because I was an undergraduate student there. I remember we met there and I did my research. I have a strong knowledge about these things, but not an especially deep knowledge about it or a deep knowledge of what the world looks like when a scientist and economist discuss in an academic atmosphere.

Ali was a very interesting and good person and he is now a professor of economics. Our class was the only one that included members of the government. At Iran University there is a student organization called