User:Hamrolly/Sharif University of Technology Association

Sharif University of Technology Association (or in short SUTA) is the association of Sharif University of Technology Alumni, current and former faculty members and staff, and current students. It has been created after a few rounds of consultation and collaboration of the alumni and former faculty members of Sharif University of Technology, in 2000. In the 2000 Reunion attendants decided to create the association and nominated a committee to write the mission, vision and the bylaw of the association. In the 2002 reunion the attendants adopted the bylaw and elected the first official board of directors of SUTA.

SUTA is registered as a non-for-profit organization in the state of California, in the USA. Since then SUTA has had a general meeting every other year, as shown in the following table:

Board of Directors
According to the Charter of SUTA, it is run by an elected Board of Directors; the elections are hold every other year among the members. The serving BoD members since its inception in 2000 have been as shown in the following table:

SUTA's impact on canceling the scientific embargo of Iranian academicians
SUTA has helped convincing IEEE and some other scientific and professional societies to retract from their policies to put Iranian scholars under embargo, and for instance not accepting papers from Iran. This effort, with the strong support of Dr. Freidun Hojabri succeeded to persuade those societies that science could not and should not follow the political games.

Awards
In 2010, SUTA’s Board of Directors launched two award programs.

1. SUTA’s Dr. Mojtahedi’s Innovation Award

This award is dedicated to recognizing the best research conducted in every department of Sharif University. It is named after the founder of Sharif University, Dr. Mohammad Ali Mojtahedi. The first award ceremony was held on June 20th, 2010 in Sharif University. Overall 48 projects from four departments were submitted for the program. This included 17 projects from Electrical Engineering, 8 projects from Chemical Engineering, 9 projects from Chemistry, and 12 projects from Materials Engineering departments. All projects were peer reviewed by a scientific advisory board including faculty members of each department and SUT alumni who are currently involved in academic or industrial research at international organizations. Three projects from each department were selected based on an evaluation criteria developed for this program. Each of these projects received an award plaque, certificates for all members of the project, and a special gift (DVD on Ancient Persians Art & Technology).

Top projects for 2010 SUTA’s Dr. Mojtahedi’s Innovation Award Program were presented in the following fields. Each of these projects received a $1000 cash prize, a plaque, and certificates for all members of the project.

2. SUTA's Dr. Amin's Lifetime Achievement Award

This award is to recognize an individual with outstanding service to the university. This award is named after Dr. Mohammad Reza Amin, the third president of Sharif University (1968-1972), who was a successful academician and industrialist whose services to Sharif University was instrumental in its astonishing success in training highly qualified engineers and scientist in later decades. Much of the processes and systems of the university is the heritage of Dr. Amin who passed away few years ago. SUTA’s Lifetime Achievement Award was named after him by the board of directors to commemorate the services of this great individual.

After several months of deliberation and considering close to 20 very qualified candidates, SUTA’s board of directors chose Dr. Siavash Shahshahani, the chairman and a long time professor of the Math Department of Sharif University of Technology as the winner of the first Dr. Amin’s lifetime achievement award. His award was presented to him in SUTA reunion in Gothenburg, Sweden on July, 24th 2010.

The 2006 incident in California
In 2006 the general meeting has been held in Santa Clara, California. Many alumni joined together from all around the world. Among them there has been also many coming from Iran. Although these people had obtained US visas to come to the reunion, few days prior to the event, the US administration canceled their visas without giving them appropriate notice. As a result, many of them have been denied the entry at the airports when they arrived into the American soil and many had spent a night in jail before they could fly back to their country. SUTA's board of directors and legal counselors tried to obtain some explanation for this behavior of the US administration and perhaps an apology with little, if any success.