Mohamed Zaghoo, undergraduate physics major, was honored on April 11 by the Arab Students' Organization at MIT at their sixth annual Science and Technology Awards Banquet.
"The MIT Arab Students' Organization Science and Technology Awards Banquet aims to recognize exceptional Arabs and Arab-Americans who have made noteworthy contribution to the fields of science and technology," said Hussam Busfar, president of the MIT Arab Students' Organization. "These individuals, with their exceptional talent and contributions, make us proud and help to change some of the negative images associated with Arabs in recent years."
Zaghoo was nominated by Dr. A. Ibrahim, his research adviser at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, for his 2008 summer work on the emissions from soft gamma-ray repeaters, a type of neutron star. He returned to MIT in the winter, when his paper, "Probing the spectral evolution of SGR 1900+14 with Swift" (with Y. AbdelAziz and A. Ibrahim) was presented.
Other awardees at the April 11 gala were Mostafa El-Sayed, Regents Professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and director of the Laser Dynamics Laboratory at Georgia Institute of Technology (Lifetime Achievement Award); Sami Shalabi, member of the technical staff at Google (Young Professional Award); and Haitham Ahmed, an MPH candidate at the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health and an MD candidate at Dartmouth Medical School (Graduate Student Award).