October 20, 2021 / Podcast Episode

Episode 9: Middle East Entrepreneurs

Immigration stories from 2 early-career entrepreneurs:   
1) an Iran-immigrant in Canada, an entrepreneur and founder of successful tech startups in Iran and Canada - she also has a PhD from Austria;  and 
2) a Lebanon-immigrant who is an MIT CS Professor (and an MIT PhD).
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Episode Guide

In this Episode: Immigration stories from two young Computer Scientists, both entrepreneurs and from different countries in the Middle East — Iran and Lebanon: 1) a founder of successful tech startup companies in Iran and Canada, with a PhD from Austria; and 2) a tenured faculty of EECS at MIT. Featuring: Soodeh Farokhi, VP of Product at Nakisa in Montreal Canada, and founder of companies C2RO (Montreal, Canada) and Service-Oriented Enterprise Architecture Institute (Iran), with a PhD from Vienna Institute of Technology, and originally from Iran (childhood and undergraduate); and 2) Fadel Adib, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at MIT, with a PhD also from EECS in MIT, and originally from Lebanon (childhood and undergraduate). More details below.

Disclaimer: Because the Middle East is a huge region, with a combined population comparable to the entire population size of the US, and because the Middle East is highly multicultural, with many religions and cultures of the world sharing the neighborhood with close proximity, no single episode can capture the experiences of all immigrants originally from Middle East, and that’s not our goal at all in this episode! Instead, our aim is to talk to two young, yet amazingly successful Computer Scientists, and listen to their amazing and intriguing stories of origin, stories of immigration, and stories of where they have come today, and a sign of where they might be headed in the coming years.

  • mm.ss: Segment Info (Index)
  • 0.00: Voices in this episode
  • Act 1: 9.13: School and University education respectively in Iran and Lebanon
    • 9.13: Soodeh
    • 11.12: Fadel
  • Act 2: 13.32: Entrance Exams to Universities in Iran and Lebanon
    • 13.32: Soodeh on Konkour Entrance Exam in Iran
  • Act 3: 22.31: Political Instability and Decision to Immigrate, Wars, Bombings, Humanitarian Work
  • Act 4: 38.28: The Entrepreneur Gene, and Discovering it
    • 38.28: Soodeh
    • 45.32: Fadel
  • Act 5: 46.52: What helps one be a good entrepreneur?
    • 46.52: Fadel on: Should students doing research be entrepreneurial?
    • 54.43: Soodeh on: Did a PhD help her be a more mature entrepreneur?
  • Act 6: 59.46: Spoken and Written Languages in Middle East: Farsi, Arabic
    • 59.46: Fadel on language in Lebanon schools, and Arabic variations in Middle East
    • 1.02.45: Soodeh on Farsi and English
  • Act 7: 1.04.44: Combating Impostor Syndrome, Failures, Rejections
    • 1.04.44: Soodeh
    • 1.08.37: Fadel
  • Act 8: 1.11.53: Soodeh’s approach for a woman to successfully manage both a family and a career.
  • Act 9: 1.17.45: Thoughts on Diversity
    • 1.17.45: Soodeh
    • 1.24.54: Fadel
Featured in this Episode

Two early-career yet already prominent computer scientists spanning entrepreneurial industry and academia, and spanning two countries in the Middle East.

  1. Soodeh Farokhi (LinkedIn), VP Product at NAKISA
    • 1980s: Born in Iran
    • 2008: Bachelors Degree, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran
    • 2011: Masters Degree, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran
    • During her Masters, founded tech startup Service-Oriented Enterprise Architecture Institute
    • 2013: Immigrated from Iran to Austria, for PhD
    • 2016: PhD in Computer Science from Technische Universität Wien (Vienna Institute of Technology)
    • 2016: Immigrated from Austria to Canada to start her company C2RO in an incubator. C2RO received over $6M in equity and non-equity money, and has 23 employees, and still growing. Soodeh served as outward-facing Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of C2RO 2016-2021.
    • 2021: Started as VP at NAKISA
    • Select Awards: Top 750 digital innovators worldwide from DataBird journal, 2018; Innovator transforming the AI Video Analytics industry by SAP, 2021.
  2. Fadel Adib (LinkedIn), Associate Professor of EECS at MIT
    • 1989: Born in Lebanon
    • 2011: Bachelors Degree, American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon
    • 2011: Immigrated from Lebanon to USA, for PhD
    • 2013: Masters in EECS from MIT, in Cambridge, USA
    • 2016: PhD in EECS from MIT, in Cambridge, USA
    • 2016: Became Assistant Professor of EECS at MIT, in Cambridge, USA
    • 2016-2021: Tenured Associate Professor of EECS at MIT, in Cambridge, USA
    • Invents new technologies to interconnect, sense, and perceive the physical world. His commercialized technologies are used to monitor thousands of patients with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and COVID19.
    • Select Awards: MIT Technology Review’s Innovators TR35 under 35 Award, 2014; and Forbes 30 under 30 list, 2015.
Links
Upcoming Episodes

This is the first episode of a 3-episode segment featuring young entrepreneurs in US and Canada originally from Iran and Lebanon.

Look for our next two episodes, featuring the full interviews with each of these narrators: Soodeh Farokhi (Episode 10), and Fadel Adib (Episode 11), and a bonus Episode 12.

In the past we have visited two other continents! Check them out!

  • Credits
    • Music Credits for Podcast
    • The caption picture at top of page is a sunrise picture taken in South Dakota (Badlands National Park). Pic taken by Indranil Gupta. 
The Immigrant Computer Scientists Podcast is available for free on your favorite devices & apps: Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and many more!
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CategoriesPodcast Episode

indygupta Written by:

Professor of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign