Atta-ur-Rahman

Atta-ur-Rahman is a Pakistani organic chemist, born in Delhi on 22 September 1942. He is professor emeritus at the International Center for Chemical and Biological Sciences at the University of Karachi and chairman of the Prime Minister's Task Force on Science and Technology. He twice served as president of the Pakistan Academy of Sciences (2003–2006 and 2011–2014), and held federal office as minister of science and technology (2000–2002), minister of education (2002) and chairman of the Higher Education Commission with the status of a federal minister (2002–2008). ¹

He was born in Old Delhi into an Urdu-speaking academic family. His grandfather, Sir Abdur Rahman, was vice-chancellor of the University of Delhi (1934–1938) and briefly a judge at the Madras High Court. He studied at the University of Karachi and at the University of Cambridge, where he took his PhD in 1968 with a thesis on synthetic studies in the indole alkaloid field, under J. Harley Mason, and was a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge. ¹

After returning to Pakistan from Cambridge, he contributed to the development of the International Center for Chemical and Biological Sciences at the University of Karachi, and to transforming higher education, science and technology in Pakistan. From 1997 he served as coordinator general of COMSTECH, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation's standing committee on scientific and technological cooperation, and he is president of the Network of Academies of Sciences in Islamic Countries. His research field is natural-product chemistry. ^{1 2}

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a foreign academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (2015), and a fellow of the World Academy of Sciences and the Pakistan Academy of Sciences. Pakistan awarded him the Tamgha-e-Imtiaz (1983), Sitara-e-Imtiaz (1991), Hilal-e-Imtiaz (1998) and Nishan-e-Imtiaz (2002), and he received the UNESCO Science Prize in 1999. ¹