Biology in my pocket

Abdul Hameed Nayyar was born in Hyderabad, British India, in 1945, to a Punjabi Muslim Khatri family. His family moved to Pakistan after Partition of India 1947.He was educated in Karachi, and attended the Karachi University where he graduated with BSc in Physics in 1964, and MSc in Physics from Karachi University in 1966.

Nayyar went to United Kingdom for his doctoral studies, attending the Imperial College in London where he obtained his PhD in condensed matter physics in 1973.His thesis covered studies on magnetic properties of the excited electrons.Upon returning to Pakistan, he joined the Institute of Theoretical Physics (now department of physics) of the Quaid-i-Azam University (QaU) and served on the faculty until 2005.

After leaving QaU in 2005, Nayyar became involved with the public policy issues regarding the education, renewable and fuel cell energy at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) in Islamabad.Since 1998, Nayyar has been a visiting research scholar at the Princeton University in the United States, and has been on the faculty to instruct courses on physics at the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Pakistan.

Irfan Siddiqi was born in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, and is a direct descendant of the well-known leader of the Khilafat Movement, Muslim activist, journalist and poet, Maulana Mohammad Ali Jauhar (Urdu: مَولانا مُحمّد علی جَوہر). Siddiqi moved to New York City at an early age. He attended the Bronx High School of Science, in the Bronx, NY, where he developed a strong interest in physics, chemistry, and mathematics. His aptitude in physics and mathematics led him to the Columbia University Science Honors Program. He went on to Harvard University to complete his undergraduate education, earning an A.B. with distinguished honors (cum laude) in Chemistry and Physics in 1997. Inspired by superconductivity and superconducting digital circuits during a summer internship at HYPRES, Inc., he enrolled at Yale University for his doctoral studies. His graduate work focused mainly on aluminum hot-electron bolometers for microwave astronomy. Upon receiving his Ph.D. in 2002, he remained as a postdoctoral fellow at Yale, under Michel Devoret and Rob Schoelkopf, to research high frequency measurement techniques for superconducting qubits.His post-doctoral work resulted in the development of the Josephson Bifurcation Amplifier, which makes use of the non-dissipative, non-linear nature of the Josephson junction to realize high gain and minimal back action measurements of quantum systems. He joined the University of California, Berkeley as a faculty member in the summer of 2005, and is currently a full professor in the Physics Department. In 2015, his laboratory was awarded the UC Berkeley Award for Excellence in Laboratory Safety, awarded by the Berkeley Office of Environment, Health and Safety.

Siddiqi's research is mainly focused on the fields of quantum electrodynamics and cQED. His current research interests include quantum error correction, multi-partite entanglement generation, quantum simulation of high-correlated condensed matter and high-energy physics theories, and single photon detection.

Siddiqi was one of the five faculty recipients of the "2016 Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award", which is the University of California, Berkeley's most prestigious honor for teaching.[6] In 2021, Siddiqi was awarded the Joseph F. Keithley Award For Advances in Measurement Science "for fundamental advances in superconducting parametric amplifiers, including the development of the Josephson traveling wave parametric amplifier, and for their application to quantum measurement and control."

As the director of the Advanced Quantum Testbed, Siddiqi and his team are on a mission to develop a digital quantum computer based on superconducting circuits to tackle fundamental science applications relevant to the US Department of Energy. The project aims to collaboratively advance the field by incorporating state-of-the-art quantum hardware into an open-access research tool for the science community.

Irfan Siddiqui is currently chairman of the department of physics at the University of California, Berkeley and a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). He currently is the director of the Quantum Nanoelectronics Laboratory at UC Berkeley and the Advanced Quantum Testbed at LBNL. Siddiqi is known for groundbreaking contributions to the field of superconducting quantum circuits, including dispersive single-shot readout of superconducting quantum bits, quantum feedback, observation of single quantum trajectories, and near-quantum limited microwave frequency amplification. In addition to other honors, for his pioneering work in superconducting devices, he was awarded with the American Physical Society George E. Valley, Jr. Prize in 2006, "for the development of the Josephson bifurcation amplifier for ultra-sensitive measurements at the quantum limit." Siddiqi is a fellow of the American Physical Society and a recipient of the UC Berkeley Distinguished Teaching Award in 2016.

Asad Ali Abidi (born July 12, 1956) is a Pakistani-American electrical engineer. He serves as a tenured professor at University of California, Los Angeles, and is the inaugural holder of the Abdus Salam Chair at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). He is best known for pioneering RF CMOS technology during the late 1980s to early 1990s. As of 2008, the radio transceivers in all wireless networking devices and modern mobile phones are mass-produced as RF CMOS devices.

Born and raised in Pakistan, Abidi was educated till matriculation at Cadet College Hasan Abdal, Pakistan, completed his high school from Dudley College of Technology, UK, and gained a B.Sc. degree (with first-class honours) in electrical engineering at Imperial College, London, in 1976. Later he attended University of California, Berkeley; he gained an M.Sc. degrees in electrical engineering in 1978 and a Ph.D in 1981 under the supervision of Robert Meyer. Abidi is an IEEE Fellow and a member of the United States National Academy of Engineering (NAE). He joined LUMS (Lahore University of Management Sciences) School of Science and Engineering as its first dean.

Since 1985, Abidi has worked at UCLA, where he is currently a Distinguished Chancellor's Professor. From 1981 to 1984, he worked for Bell Laboratories as a Member of Technical Staff at the Advanced LSI Development Laboratory. He was a Visiting Faculty Researcher at Hewlett Packard Laboratories in 1989. He is one of only a few Pakistani-origin members of the NAE.and was recognized as an ISSCC top-ten author.

While working at Bell and then UCLA, he pioneered radio research in metal–oxide–semiconductor (MOS) technology and made seminal contributions to radio architecture based on complementary MOS (CMOS) switched-capacitor (SC) technology. While working at Bell in the early 1980s, he worked on the development of sub-micron MOSFET (metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor) VLSI (very large-scale integration) technology at the Advanced LSI Development Lab, along with Marty Lepselter, George E. Smith and Harry Bol. As one of the few circuit designers at the lab, Abidi demonstrated the potential of sub-micron NMOS integrated circuit technology in high-speed communication circuits, and developed the first MOS amplifiers for Gb/s data rates in optical fiber receivers. Abidi's work was initially met with skepticism from proponents of GaAs and bipolar junction transistors, the dominant technologies for high-speed circuits at the time. In 1985 he joined UCLA, where he pioneered RF CMOS technology during the late 1980s to early 1990s. His work changed the way in which RF circuits would be designed, away from discrete bipolar transistors and towards CMOS integrated circuits.

He was a visiting researcher at HP Labs for a year in 1989, during which time he investigated A/D conversion at ultra-high speeds, before returning to UCLA and researching analog signal chains for disk drive read channels, high-speed A/D conversion, and analog CMOS circuits for signal processing and communications. Abidi, along with UCLA colleagues J. Chang and Michael Gaitan, demonstrated the first RF CMOS amplifier in 1993. In 1995, Abidi used CMOS switched-capacitor technology to demonstrate the first direct-conversion transceivers for digital communications.

In the late 1990s, the RF CMOS technology that he pioneered was widely adopted in wireless networking, as mobile phones began entering widespread use. As of 2008, the radio transceivers in all wireless networking devices and modern mobile phones are mass-produced as RF CMOS devices.

Abidi served as the Program Secretary for the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) from 1984 to 1990, and was the General Chairman of the Symposium on VLSI Circuits in 1992.He was the Secretary of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Council from 1990 to 1991. From 1992 to 1995, he was the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.

Awards and recognitions:

2013 Armstrong Memorial Lecturer, Columbia University

2013 ISSCC Outstanding Contributor over its 60 years

2012 Best Paper Award, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits (co-winner)

2012 ISSCC Distinguished Technical Paper Award

2009 The World Academy of Sciences-TWAS

2008 UCLA HSSEAS Lockheed Martin Award for Excellence in Teaching

2008 IEEE Donald O. Pederson Award in Solid-State Circuits
"For pioneering and sustained contributions in the development of RF-CMOS"

2007 National Academy of Engineering
"For contributions to the development of integrated circuits for MOS RF communications"

Top 10 contributors to the ISSCC in its 50-year history

2000 IEEE Third Millennium Medal

1998 Design Contest Award at the Design Automation Conference

1997 ISSCC Jack R***r Outstanding
Technology Directions Paper Award

1997 IEEE Donald G. Fink Prize Paper Award

1996 Best Paper Award of the 21st European Solid State Circuits Conference

1988 TRW Award for Innovative Teaching Postdoctoral Research Associate

Muhammad Suhail Zubairy, HI, SI, FPAS (born 19 October 1952),is a University Distinguished Professor as of 2014 in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the Texas A&M University and is the inaugural holder of the Munnerlyn-Heep Chair in Quantum Optics.

In 2017, Prof. Suhail Zubairy was awarded the Changjiang Distinguished Chair at Huazhong University of Science and Technology. This is the highest award of the Chinese Government to a university professor and is rarely given to a non-Chinese. He has made pioneering contributions in the fields of Quantum computing, laser physics and quantum optics. He has authored and co-authored several books and over 300 research papers on a wide variety of research problems relating to theoretical physics. His research and work has been widely recognised by the physics community and he has won many international awards. In addition, he took part as the lead lecturer in the Casper College Quantum Science Camp during July 2022.

Zubairy attended Edwardes College in Peshawar, where he received double BSc degree in physics and mathematics from the Peshawar University, in 1971.He was conferred with Gold Medal with his degree by Peshawar University.He received MSc in physics from the Quaid-i-Azam University in 1974, and his PhD in physics from the University of Rochester under the guidance of Professor Emil Wolf in 1978. He wrote an internationally renowned textbook on Quantum Optics that he co-authored with Marlan O. Scully.

His research interests are very wide and he has written papers on quantum optical applications to quantum computing, quantum informatics, quantum entanglement and sub-wavelength atom localisation. More recently, Zubairy has concentrated most of his efforts on research in quantum microscopy and quantum lithography, some of which are ground breaking. For example, his papers on sub-wavelength lithography using classical light sources are very well received. His recent Physical Review Letters was reviewed in Physical Review Focus as well as in the News of the Week section of Nature. Another of his recent Physical Review Letters was selected by Science as a news release with the title "A new way to beat the limit on shrinking transistors".

Amer Iqbal is a Pakistani American theoretical physicist. He is primarily known for his work in string theory and mathematical physics.

Amer Iqbal has a Doctorate in Theoretical physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He carried out his doctoral research under the supervision of Barton Zwiebach. He has held a faculty position at University of Washington and postdoctoral positions at the University of Texas at Austin and at Harvard University. He also worked as an associate professor of physics at Lahore University of Management Sciences and Abdus Salam School of Mathematical Sciences. He currently resides in the United States.

Amer Iqbal was awarded the Abdus Salam Award for physics in 2012 for his work on superstring theory and its relationship with supersymmetry and gauge theories.He was also awarded the COMSTECH Award for physics in 2020 for his work on six dimensional little strings and their geometric engineering using F-theory on elliptic Calabi-Yau threefolds.

Hafeez Hoorani or Hafeez-ur-Rehman Hoorani or Hafeez R. Hoorani is a Pakistani particle physicist, with a specialisation in accelerator physics, and a research scientist at the CERN.Hoorani is working at the National Center for Physics, with research focus in elementary particle physics and high energy physics. Until the end of 2013, he served as scientific director of International Centre for Synchrotron-Light for Experimental Science Applications in the Middle East (SESAME) and is now research associate at the National Center for Nuclear Physics, Islamabad.

He has served as a full professor of high energy physics at the National Center for Physics where he heads a group building the muon chamber for the Compact Muon Solenoid detector. He has also supervised the two PhD students during his stay at the National Center for Physics.

Hoorani was born in Karachi and received his early education from there. He attended Karachi University in 1976 and received his BSc with Honors in physics in 1980, followed by his MSc in particle physics from the same institution in 1982. On a KU's awarded scholarship, Hoorani went to Burnaby, Canada where he attended Simon Fraser University. In October 1986, he received his PhD[citation needed] in Experimental High Energy Physics under the supervision of Dr. David H. Boal, writing his thesis on Numerical Solution for Hydrodynamic Equations For the Quark-Gluon Plasma.

In 1987, Hoorani joined the International Centre for Theoretical Physics where he continued his research into Quark–gluon plasma and published a brief journal on Production of J/ψ IK Quark-Gloun Plasma in February 1988. Hoorani joined CERN in 1989 where he carried out a large amount of research at CERN's Large Electron–Positron Collider or LEP. In 1999, he returned to Pakistan for a short visit where he successfully convinced the Government of Pakistan to set up a group working on different aspects of the Large Hadron Collider at the National Center for Physics. Due to his efforts, in 2000 Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (led by nuclear physicist Dr. Ishfaq Ahmad) signed an agreement with CERN. This agreement opened the door for Pakistani physicists to collaborate with CERN's particle physics project. His current research area is the development of gaseous detectors for the hadron collider.

Tayyaba Zafar (born 29 May 1983) is a Pakistani-born astronomer and science communicator. She is widely known to the public as the first woman from Pakistan who visited Antarctica under the Homeward Bound Program. She completed her PhD in astronomy from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark in 2011 and worked at the European Southern Observatory and Australian Astronomical Observatory. She researches how metals and dust form in distant galaxies and their effects are on star formation and other galaxy properties.

Tayyaba Zafar was born and grew up in Lahore, Pakistan.She completed her PhD in 2011,at the Dark Cosmology Center, University of Copenhagen with a thesis entitled Spectroscopy of high redshift sightlines. This started her astrophysics career working on interstellar medium studies.

After completing her PhD, Tayyaba Zafar accepted a postdoctoral position at the Laboratorie d’Astrophysique de Marseille, France. In 2013, she moved to Germany to take up a fellowship at the European Southern Observatory (ESO).She later accepted a Research Astronomer role at the Australian Astronomical Observatory. She moved to Australia in November 2015,and supported the Anglo Australian Telescope at the Siding Spring Observatory. In mid-2018, she was hired by Macquarie University where she is currently serving as a Senior-Lecturer.

Her research focuses on the obscured universe and its connection with properties of galaxies. As of June 2021, SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System lists her 59 refereed publications.

Dr Tayyaba Zafar became recognised as a public figure when she visited Antarctica in 2018 under the Homeward Bound project, a personal and professional development program to empower STEMM women leaders. She has given public talks such as for Sydney Science Festival, talks to amateur astronomical societies, schools, and universities and written scientific online articles. She is a member of the 2021 CSIRO STEM Professionals in Schools, Australia program to team up with teachers to educate and inspire students. She has given multi-lingual TV interviews, including a one-to-one interview for Such TV and breakfast show with Lahore News TV. She has radio and print interviews including interviews for BBC World, ABC News, SBS,and EFE Verde. She has online articles on astronomy, instrumentation,and women in STEM issues.She has been invited as a panelist for women in STEM discussion panels e.g., Sydney Science Trail in 2020.

Sami Khan Solanki (born 1958 in Karachi, Pakistan) is director of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS), director of the Sun-Heliosphere Department of MPS, a scientific member of the Max Planck Society, and a Chair (and spokesperson) of the International Max Planck Research School on Physical Processes in the Solar System and Beyond at the Universities of Braunschweig and Göttingen.

Solanki is also an Honorary Professor at the Institute of Astronomy at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, and (2) Institute for Geophysics and Extraterrestrial Physics at the Braunschweig University of Technology in Germany. In addition, he is a Distinguished Professor at the Kyung Hee University in Korea.

He is the editor-in-chief of the Living Reviews in Solar Physics, an exclusively web-based, peer-reviewed journal, publishing reviews of research in all areas of solar and heliospheric physics. Living Reviews in Solar Physics was recently rated with an impact factor of 17.636 taking the third place in the "Astronomy & Astrophysics" category.

Solanki's main topics of research are:

Solar and heliospheric physics, in particular solar magnetism and Sun-Earth relations
Stellar astrophysics, mainly stellar activity and magnetism
Astronomical tests of theories of gravitation
Atomic and molecular physics of astronomical interest
Protoplanetary discs and extrasolar planets
Radiative transfer of polarised light
He has also held these positions:
(1) Vice-Chairman and member of the Senate Committee of the German Aerospace Centre (DLR);
(2) Member Appointment Committee and Committee of Three of the DLR;
(3) Member Extraterrestrial Program Committee of the DLR;
(4) Science Advisory Committee of the High Altitude Observatory, Boulder/USA;
(5) Science Advisory Board at the Istituto Ricerche Solari (IRSOL), Locarno/Switzerland;and has contributed to the following space/balloon projects:

Sunrise (PI)
STEREO Secchi (Co-I)
SDO HMI (Co-I)
Solar Orbiter PHI (PI)

Academic career:

1987 Doctorate from the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich

1987–1989 Post doc in St. Andrews, Scotland.

1992 Habilitation

1998 Professor of Astronomy at the University of Oulu in Finland

1999 Minnaert guest professor at the University of Utrecht

1999 Director of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research

Awards and honours:

2001 Honorary professor at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule

2003 Honorary professor at the Technische Universität Braunschweig

2006 Associateship of the Royal Astronomical Society

2008 Presented the Bernard Price Memorial Lecture in South Africa

2022 George Ellery Hale Prize

In 2011, Solanki delivered a lecture, "Is the Sun to Blame for Global Warming?,” at the first Starmus Festival in the Canary Islands. His talk was subsequently published in the book Starmus: 50 Years of Man in Space.