Muhammad Sahimi

Muhammad Sahimi (born 22 January 1954) is a Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science, and holds the NIOC Chair in petroleum engineering at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles. He is also active in journalism, writing frequently on Iranian politics.

Career

Sahimi received his B.S. degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Tehran in 1977. After briefly working for the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC), he received a scholarship from the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran and travelled to the USA in 1978 (where he has since remained), completing his Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota in 1984. He then moved to the University of Southern California, becoming Chairman of his department from 1999-2005. Since then he has held the NIOC Chair, which was formerly known as the "Shah Chair", having been endowed by Shah Reza Pahlavi. He has also been a visiting professor in Australia and Europe, and a consultant to many industrial corporations.

Sahimi has carried out research in the fields of fluid flow through porous media, use of multiresolution wavelet transformations for upscaling of geological models of oil reservoirs, transport and mechanical properties of composite materials, fracture propagation in heterogeneous materials, separation and purification by nanoporous membranes, atomistic modelling of membranes and other nanostructured materials, atomistic modelling of membranes and other nanostructured materials, diffusion, reaction, and deactivation in porous catalysts, and percolation theory and its applications.

Political views

Since 2003, Sahimi has written many articles on the subject of Iranian politics (particularly the Iranian nuclear programme) for websites such as Payvand, Antiwar.com and the Huffington Post. He has been a regular columnist for Tehran Bureau since 2008, and has written occasional pieces for the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal the Harvard International Review and The Progressive.

Sahimi writes in broad support of moderate and reformist elements of Iranian politics, considering himself a member of the Green Movement and often reprinting statements of prominent Greens. He holds the view that Iran's disputed 2009 election was fraudulent.

He has on many occasions defended Iran's nuclear programme as being peaceful, and the actions of Iran as being essentially legal and justifiable (originally in a seven-part series at Payvand entitled Iran's Nuclear Program), in the course of which he has frequently complained of media bias on the nuclear issue, and has accused a number of journalists (such as Con Coughlin and David Albright) of knowingly spreading lies and disinformation, as well making similar accusations against two former Deputy Directors-General of the IAEA, Olli Heinonen and Pierre Goldschmidt. Sahimi cited unnamed sources to accuse Heinonen of breaking IAEA protocols by leaking confidential information to David Albright and other journalists, and of spreading false information as part of a "crusade against Iran", and has accused Goldschmidt of spreading "lies and fabrications" and of having a "personal agenda" over the disputed Laptop, whilst also disputing Goldschmidt's assessment that Iran has violated the NPT.

Other statements have also proven controversial, including Sahimi's view that the UN Security Council sanctions against Iran are illegal, and because of the similarity of his arguments to those used by the Iranian government he has been accused of being close to the government in Tehran. Sahimi has denied these accusations, but has stated that his articles have been used without his knowledge by members of the Iranian political establishment including Ayatollah Rafsanjani.

Books

1. Applications of Percolation Theory (1994)
2. Flow and Transport in Porous Media and Fractured Rock (1995)
3. Heterogeneous Materials I, Linear Transport and Optical Properties (2003)
4. Heterogeneous Materials II, Nonlinear and Breakdown Properties and Atomistic Modeling (2003)