Photo Credit: Eren Goknar
Azadeh Tabazadeh is the author of The Sky Detective, a debut memoir about her childhood and adolescent years in Iran. Her story offers an eyewitness account of what life was like inside an Iranian household and on the streets of Tehran, before and after the 1979 Islamic Revolution and during the war with Iraq. Excerpts from her memoir have won several prestigious writing contests, including the East of Eden Award in 1998 and the San Francisco Writers Conference Grand Prize in 2012. The Sky Detective has received a star-rating from Booklist and has been named as one of The Best books of 2015 by Kirkus Reviews.
Azadeh fled Iran in 1982, two years after the Iraq invasion of Iran, to pursue her dream of becoming a scientist. In 1994 Azadeh received a doctoral degree in chemistry from UCLA. Since then, she has worked as a Senior Research Scientist at NASA Ames and a Professor of Geophysics at Stanford University. She has published over sixty scientific articles and has received prestigious awards/medals from major scientific and government organizations, including the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society, the American Institute of Physics, NASA, and the White House Office of Science and Technology. Among her many accolades are a Presidential White House Science Award (that she received from President Clinton in 1999), a feature article in Time that details her personal life and scientific discoveries, and being named by Popular Science as one of the “Brilliant 10” young scientists in the United States in 2002. She has three children and lives in Mountain View, California.
