Firouz Naderi

Naderi was born in Shiraz, schooled there and at Andisheh High School in Tehran, and left Iran in 1964 for the United States. He took his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at Iowa State University in 1969, worked as an engineer in Santa Barbara for two years, then took his master's (1972) and doctorate (1976) at the University of Southern California. He returned to Iran for three years with the Iranian Remote Sensing Agency, leaving again in July 1979, months after the revolution, and never returned. ¹

Naderi joined JPL in September 1979 as a communications systems engineer. He managed the NASA Scatterometer project, receiving NASA's Outstanding Leadership Medal, then the Origins Program. In April 2000, after two consecutive failures, he was named program manager for Mars exploration and re-planned the program as a chain of missions launched every two years; the five years under his leadership included the successful landings of the rovers Spirit and Opportunity, and for it he received NASA's highest award, the Distinguished Service Medal, in 2005. He then served six years as JPL's first associate director for Project Formulation and Strategy, creating its Innovation Foundry, and spent his last five years as Director for Solar System Exploration, responsible for Cassini, Dawn, Juno and the formulation of the Mars helicopter and a mission to Europa. He retired in February 2016; asteroid 1989 EL1 was renamed 5515 Naderi in his honour. ^{1 2}

After NASA, Naderi worked as a management consultant, adviser to early-stage technology startups and public speaker, taught executive-education modules at Stanford, and served on the boards of Iranian-American and philanthropic organisations, including the Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans and the Encyclopaedia Iranica. In February 2017 he and Anousheh Ansari accepted the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film on behalf of Asghar Farhadi, absent because of the 2017 travel restrictions. In May 2023 a fall with a cardiac episode left him paralysed from the neck down, and he died in Los Angeles on 9 June 2023, aged 77. ¹

His faith is recorded as unknown, because the sources document an absence of affiliation rather than an affiliation. The English article states: "He had no religious affiliation," adding that in a 2011 interview he called himself a "spiritual" person, believing in "something" beyond himself, "but not within the framework of any religion." The Persian article likewise states that he had no religious affiliation and reports his answer, in an interview about Stephen Hawking's view of the non-existence of God, that he believed in no kind of religion or sect, God being for him separate from religion. Two texts thus attest non-affiliation; but since he expressly affirmed a God apart from religion, the standard for atheist-or-sceptic is not met, and no value records an affiliation he disclaimed. Wikidata carries no religion value. ^{1 3 4}

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