Hadi ghaemi biography

He was a professor of physics at City University of New York until 2000.
Ghaemi excelled, and eventually earned a doctorate in physics from BU, before becoming a tenure-track professor specializing in nanophysics at the City.
Executive director of @ICHRI + @ICHRI_FA.

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Providing Analysis of a Closed, Secretive Country in Crisis

A single word offered Hadi Ghaemi his first hint that change might be imminent in his native Iran.

Forupashi, Persian for collapse.

He spotted the word in a series of essays from a well-known Iranian economist a couple years ago. Then he began hearing it from the mouths of other Iranian commentators. This was well before a 22-year-old Kurdish woman died in police custody in Tehran, triggering women-led nationwide protests often met by brutal violence from security forces.

This was well before a 22-year-old Kurdish woman died in police custody in Tehran, triggering women-led nationwide demonstrations often met by brutal violence from security forces.

“The references to the concept of forupashi—that everything is falling apart—revealed a mood,” said Ghaemi, an internationally recognized expert on Iran and human rights who cofounded the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI) in 2008.

That Ghaemi could read these tea leaves so easily is a credit to the years he has spent absorbing the voices and attitudes of

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Bio: Hadi Ghaemi

Hadi Ghaemi, Executive Director
@hadighaemi

Hadi Ghaemi is an internationally recognized expert on Iran and human rights. In 2008, he founded the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI), formerly the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran. CHRI has since become a leading organization documenting human rights violations in Iran and building international coalitions to support human rights.

Previously, Ghaemi worked with Human Rights Watch, joining the organization in 2004 as the Iran and United Arab Emirates researcher. His work at Human Rights Watch focused international attention on the plight of migrant workers in Dubai, as well as the repression of civil society in Iran. After the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, he was a member of the first UN-commissioned human rights fact-finding mission to Afghanistan. Between 2001 and 2004, he worked with NGOs focusing on Afghanistan and Iraq.

Born in Iran, Ghaemi came to the United States in 1983 as a student and received his doctorate in physics from Boston University in 1994. He was a profe

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The Iranian military advanced in the streets of Shiraz, about 600 miles south of Tehran, shooting protestors where they stood. It was 1979, and the Iranian people were rising up against the reigning monarchy in a widespread movement that immobilized the country. Though protests and strikes had shut down the country’s schools, 11-year-old Hadi Ghaemi found “enlightenment in the streets.” When the citizens overthrew the secret service building, he was among the first to enter, and what he saw there would inform his life’s work: “You could see the prison cells, torture instruments—the physical evidence of the way students and political prisoners were treated.”

In the uprising—known as the Iranian Revolution—protestors were fighting for their fundamental human rights: freedom of expression, thought, religion, and dissent. “The collective idea of a post-revolutionary Iran was a place where peaceful dissent and criticism would be tolerated, and journalists, writers, artists, intellectuals would not go to jail and be tortured just because th