Hi there !

You might wonder about who I am and where I come from...well let me tell you a little about myself.

I was born in a small town called Qasr-e-Shirin (the Palace of Shirin) located in Eastern Kurdistan into a rather political family. My paternal ancestors came from nowadays called Southern Kurdistan (I have been told that they migrated to Eastern Kurdistan more than 100 years ago when we did not have the prefixes of South, East, and North separating us from one another) and my maternal ancestors are from Eastern Kurdistan. Nevertheless, I think of myself as a Kurd; the whole Kurdistan is my home: North, South, and East.

The town of Qasr-e-Shirin is on the southwestern slopes of the Zagros Mountains, a rugged mountain chain that has protected the Kurds for thousand of years. There is a Kuridsh proverb saying "the Kurds [as a nation] have no friends except the mountains". My home town is what you could call the Florida of Kurdistan; it is where the summers are hot (40 to 50 degrees Celsius that is 104 to 122 degrees Fahrenheit) and the winters are mild (5 to 15 degrees Celsius that is 41 to 59 degrees Fahrenheit). It is known that people from other towns in the region would come to Qasr-e-Shirin for their winter vacation since it was much closer and a lot more beautiful than Southern Iran. This hot climate and the region's low humidity make the region a very good candidate to grow many plants and fruits that are best adopted to dry and hot climate. This town was occupied by the Iraqi army in the second day of the Iran-Iraq war and remained under their occupation until the very last days of the war. When the Iraqi army retreated, they left nothing standing; the whole town which was the home for some 38,000 people was leveled with the ground.

Some anthropologists based on their studies of the region have claimed that the first settlers came to this town some 10,000 years ago. There have been many excavation in the town itself and the surrounding areas which have resulted in recovering many artifacts dating back to the Median and the Persian Empires (some even going back more). There were some very important historical places and monuments in the suburb of the town but all were destroyed by the retreating Iraqi army for no reason whatsoever during the last days of the Iran-Iraq war.

Kurdistan is my homeland. It is a land of wonders and beauties, a land that has retained its identity despite numerous barbaric attempts to assimilate its inhabitants throughout the history. People in Kurdistan speak an Indo-European language called Kurdish. Kurdistan has been divided between Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria with some Kurds living in the southwestern republics of the old USSR. The population of the Kurds in the world has been estimated to be somewhere between 30 to 40 million. The reason for estimating the population and not being able to provide you with actual figures is that the countries amongst which Kurdistan has been divided do not want to acknowledge that they have a large population of Kurds. In the case of Turkey, the government even refuses to acknowledge their existence; they are called "Mountain Turks" in Turkey!

Now I am here at Texas Tech University working on my Ph.D. in analytical chemistry with emphasis on separation science (ironic, isn't it?...a Kurd studying separation science!). I am a member of the largest research group in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry; there are about 25 researchers in this group. We use many techniques such as solvent extraction, polymeric inclusion membrane transport, ion chromatography, ion selective electrodes,...to study large organic molecules which contain chelate rings. We are mainly interested in their bonding selectivity toward many different metal cations. This is an exciting area of study since by developing new molecules we hope to be able to cultivate radioactive species formed in nuclear reactors and therefore prevent their entry into the environment. There are also many other practical applications for the molecules that we develop and study, ranging from electronic to synthetic chemistry.

Well, I guess that this will give you a pretty good idea about who I am :-)

If you are interested to know more about my research you can e-mail me.