Habib Nafisi

Habib Nafisi is the founder of Tehran Polytechnic (Amirkabir University of Technology). He founded it in 1958 with 5 engineering departments. He also founded the University of Mazandaran and Iran University of Science and Technology.

Habib Naficy was born in Rasht in December 1908. His father, Dr. Ali Asghar Naficy, Moadeb od Dowleh, was a well-known physician who served as the doctor and guardian of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, when as Crown Prince he attended boarding school in Switzerland. Naficy’s grandfather, Dr. Ali Akbar Naficy, Nazem ol Atteba, was a senior court physician during the Qajar Dynasty, and a medical scholar, known for having compiled the “Naficy Encyclopedia” (Fahrangeh Naficy), and for establishing Western-style hospitals in Tehran, Mashad and Isfahan.

Habib Naficy received his early education in Tehran at the Ecole Saint Louis, a French Catholic School, and at the famous Dar el Fonoun School. He broke with family tradition by studying engineering at the university level, because he believed that what Iran needed most were engineers. He completed his undergraduate university education in mechanical engineering at the University of Toulouse in France, and in electrical engineering at an institute in Paris. Upon returning to Iran, he joined the Army and was sent on a government scholarship to receive practical training at a trucking company in Indianapolis, purchase armored trucks for the Iranian Army, and at the same time pursue graduate studies in mechanical engineering at Purdue University. When relations between Iran and the U.S. soured because of a diplomatic incident, he was called back and sent instead to Germany in 1936 to continue his practical training and purchase trucks for the Iranian Army. He also spent some time training in Czechoslovakia.

After finishing his practical training in Germany, Habib Naficy returned to Iran in 1938 to become director of a military ammunitions factory at Saltanat-Abbad in the suburbs of Tehran. He left the Army in 1943 to become Director of Labor Affairs in the Ministry of Commerce. In this position he was instrumental in drafting the first comprehensive labor laws in Iran in 1946. He was the leader of the Iranian delegation to the ILO Conference 1945 in Paris (Habib Nafici 3rd from the left, 4th Abolhassan Hakimi, 5th the famous Iranian writer Mohammad Ali Jamalzadeh).

After the establishment of Ministry of Labor in the same year, he became Undersecretary of Labor, a position he held until 1950. During this time, he tried to improve the condition of workers, and as a staunch anti-communist, he promoted the formation of non-communist labor unions as counterweight to the labor unions affiliated with the pro-communist Tudeh Party. Naficy was briefly Deputy Minister and Acting Minister of Labor in 1951 in the short-lived Hossein Ala cabinet, preceding Dr. Mossadegh’s government.

...
Wikipedia