The Iranian-Armenian scientist they refused a scholarship because she was a woman — who answered by becoming Iran's first female physics professor and the Mother of Iranian Astronomy.
Alenush Terian (1920–2011) is remembered as the Mother of Iranian Astronomy — an Iranian-Armenian physicist and astronomer who became the first woman professor of physics in Iran and co-founded the country's first solar observatory.
Born in Tehran to an Armenian family — her father a poet of the community — she graduated from the University of Tehran in 1947 and began work in its physics laboratories. Denied a scholarship abroad at first because she was a woman, she persisted, eventually studying in Paris at the Sorbonne, and returned to become Iran's first female professor of physics in 1964.
In 1966 she helped establish the solar physics observatory of the University of Tehran, where she worked until retirement, training generations of Iranian physicists — many of them women who saw in her the proof that the field was theirs too. Beloved by her students, she never married, famously calling her students her children.
They told her a scholarship would be wasted on a woman. She became the mother of an entire nation's astronomy.
— On Alenush Terian's persistenceTerian died in Tehran in 2011, mourned by Iran's scientific community and the Armenian community alike. Iranian television documentaries, commemorations, and the affection of her students secured her title — the Mother of Iranian Astronomy, and one of the great Armenian women of science.
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