Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam

Who is Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam?

Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, possibly Amiri-Moghadam, is a Norwegian-Iranian neuroscientist and human rights advocate.

Amiry-Moghaddam spent his first few years in the city of Kerman about 1000 kilometers south-east of Tehran in Iran. He arrived in Norway as a refugee of minor age, via Pakistan in 1985.

Amiry-Moghaddam completed his medical studies in 1996 at the University of Oslo, and later obtained a PhD at the Center for Neuroscience and Molecular Biology in that university. In 2004, he received the King's gold medal for the best medical doctorate at the University of Oslo. Amiry-Moghaddam has been a collaborator to Peter Agre, who received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2003. Amiry-Moghaddam spent one year as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School in 2006.

Amiry-Moghaddam was awarded the Anders Jahre Awards medicine prize for young scientists in 2008, He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

In 2013 Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam was selected by an independent panel as one of the 10 "brightest minds" in Norway. The list was published in the Norwegian newspaper VG.

Amiry-Moghaddam is well known as a defender of human rights. He received the Norwegian Amnesty International's human rights prize in 2007 for his work against the human rights violations in Iran.