Cheick Modibo Diarra

Cheick Modibo Diarra
Prime Minister of Mali Acting
In office 17 April 2012 – 11 December 2012
President	Dioncounda Traoré (Acting)
Preceded by	Cissé Mariam Kaïdama Sidibé
Succeeded by	Django Sissoko (Acting)
Personal details
Born	1952 (age 64–65) Nioro du Sahel, French Sudan (now Mali)
Political party	Rally for the Development of Mali
Alma mater	Pierre and Marie Curie University Howard University

Cheick Modibo Diarra (born 1952) is a Malian astrophysicist, businessman, and politician who was acting Prime Minister of Mali from April 2012 to December 2012.

On 11 December 2012, Diarra presented his resignation on state television in a broadcast at 4 a.m. local time, hours after soldiers who led the 2012 Malian coup d'état arrested him at his home in Bamako.

Diarra was born in Nioro du Sahel, Mali. He is the son-in-law of former president Moussa Traoré. After graduating high school in Mali, Cheick Modibo Diarra studied mathematics, physics, and analytic mechanics in Paris at the University of Pierre and Marie Curie. He then received a Masters in aerospace engineering and a PhD in mechanical engineering, both from Howard University in Washington, D.C. He was recruited by Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a NASA Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC) under a contractor with the California Institute of Technology, where he played a role in several NASA programs, including the Magellan probe to Venus, the Ulysses probe to the Sun, the Galileo spacecraft to Jupiter, and the Mars Observer and Mars Pathfinder. He later became the director of education and public outreach for NASA's Mars Exploration program. Dr. Diarra also served as an executive for the Microsoft Corporation. He also obtained American citizenship.

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