Director General Biography
Dr. Tahir Shaaran was born during the Russian invasion in Afghanistan in a rural family in Bamyan province. When he was a young child his family had left Bamyan because of the burning civil wars and went to the safer areas of the country. He spent part of his childhood and early adolescence in Mazar-e-Sharif and in neighboring countries.
During the Taliban era in the 1999, Tahir Shaaran fled the country and went to Europe alone and settled in Great Britain. With great effort and dedication, in 2003 he has joined the University of UCL in London, one of the most prestigious universities in the world in the field of physics to pursue a bachelor's degree. He has also received his master's degree from the same university. During his undergraduate and postgraduate studies, he has worked in the field of neutron scattering at international Institute of Laue–Langevin in France, the world's largest nuclear power plant in the production of neutron. He has also collaborated with Rutherford international laboratory in the United Kingdom using Synchrotron radiation for studying heavy fermion.
In 2007, Dr Shaaran has received a special scholarship from department of atomic and molecular Physics of University of UCL to peruse his Ph.D. During his Doctoral Studying, he has collaborated with The Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona-Spain, Wuhan Institute of Physics and Mathematics in China, Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai and faculty of Physics at the University of Lancaster in the United Kingdom. He graduated in early 2011 by outstanding doctoral thesis award and the result of his doctoral thesis was five scientific papers in prestigious journals such as the Journal of the American Society of Physics.
Dr Shaaran has worked as a research fellow on cutting age research themes related to atomic and nuclear physics; he has also lectured at a range of internationally recognized research centers, including the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear physics in Germany, the Atomic Energy commission of France (CEA-Saclay), University College London and the Institute of Photonic Science (ICFO) in Barcelona, Spain. He has published more than 25 scientific papers in high impact international journal and participated dozens of international conferences.
Between 2014 to 2018 he studied fundamental behavior, such as quantum dynamic of atom and molecule exposed to the strong laser field at the Max Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg. At the Atomic Energy commission of France (CEA-Saclay) he was awarded a Marie Curie research fellowship; his research focused on probing molecular and atomic dynamic in real time. At the Institute of Photonic Science in 2012 he sought to contribute to cutting age of new research discipline by combining the strong laser field physics with plasmonic nanostructure for generating high energy photon and short laser pulse at table-lab facility as well as real time study of atomic and molecular behavior in real time.
In August 2018, he was appointed as General Director of Afghanistan Atomic Energy High Commission by the Afghan president, Dr Ashraf Ghani.