Maryam Mazinani, a staff member in the School of Physics at Damghan University, did her first ascent in 2022 to the summit of Island Peak at an altitude of 6189 meters. She accomplished this achievement after repeatedly conquering the highest mountains in Iran (including Damavand Peak) and climbing Mount Ararat of Turkey with a height of 5137 meters, Kilimanjaro Summit (the highest peak in Africa) with a height of 5895 meters and Mount Elbrus in Europe with a height of 5642 meters.

On her trip to Nepal, the home of Mount Everest, Mazinani climbed the 5364-meter-high base camp and then ascended the summit of Island Peak (Sagarmatha National Park, the Himalayas) on Tuesday, March 29, 2022.

The First International Conference on Holography and its Applications was virtually held at the School of Physics on March 9 and 10, 2022. The conference hosted more than 120 prominent researchers and professors of physics from all around the world. Dr. Behnam Pourhassan, the scientific secretary of the conference, stated that the conference was cooperated by the Department of Nuclear and Particles Physics at Damghan University and the Canadian Quantum Research Center. Dr. Pourhassan reported that 18 specialists of holography comprised the scientific committee of the conference, who reviewed the submitted papers and invited the speakers. These specialists were from different countries including Iran, Italy, Canada, Turkey, China, Poland, USA and South Africa. In addition, 195 professors, postdoctoral researchers and students of physics from both Iran and around the world registered and participated in the conference.

The participants in the conference were addressed by five keynote speakers, who are well known in their respective fields; moreover, 20 invited speakers presented their latest achievements. The keynote and invited speakers were from Iran, Italy, India, South Africa, Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, the United States, Canada, Brazil, Finland, Belgium, Poland and Azerbaijan. The conference also held a total of 45 presentation sessions, consisting of 38 lectures and 7 poster presentations. The lecture sessions were supervised by people from Iran, Greece, Italy and South Africa, and eight papers from Iran, Germany, India and Brazil were selected by the editorial board members of Journal of Holography Applications in Physics[WU1]  for publication in this journal. 33,555 visits to the conference website were reported by the end of the conference.

Despite the geographical diversity of the participants, one of the significant accomplishments of this virtual conference was that all conference sessions were held without any occurrence of interruption, cancellation or delay and according to the scheduled program.  

In the latest ranking by Times Higher Education (2022), Damghan University, along with 36 other Iranian universities, was among the best young universities (less than 50 years old) in the world. The department of public relations and international scientific cooperation in the Institute for Science Citation (ISC) reported that “from among the 539 best young universities in the Times ranking, the Islamic Republic of Iran had a share of 37 universities.”

The positions of Iranian universities in the Times ranking of best young universities in the world from 2017 to 2022 is given in the following table.

Dr. Dehghani, the head of ISC, said that Sharif University of Technology was present in the ranking from 2012 when it was introduced until 2016, but then the university was more than 50 years old. Also, the major universities in Iran such as University of Tehran, Tehran University of Medical Sciences and Shiraz University, which have been present in other Times rankings, are more than 50 years old and therefore they are not listed in the ranking of best young universities in the world. Dr. Dehghani added, “Times Higher Education presents one of the most eminent international systems for ranking universities, which does so based on 13 performance indicators under the five general criteria of education, research, citation index, industrial income, and international funding in order to make comprehensive and balanced comparisons.”

In the latest report from the Nature Ranking Index, Damghan University not only has succeeded in preserving its highest-ranking position in the Semnan Province, but it also has improved its national rank by three [Link]. In Physics, DU has claimed the 2nd rank in Iran (after the Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences/IPM) [Link] and the 13th rank in the Western Asia [Link]. Globally, DU has ranked 739th in Physics, according to the report [Link].  

It is an honor to announce that five of the DU professors are among the 2 percent most cited scientists of the world, according to the 2020 report from Scopus (Elsevier’s abstract and citation database). The report ranks the world’s scientists under 5 subject fields, 22 subfields, and 176 academic majors.  The DU professors listed in the 2020 report are

Dr. Behnam Pourhassan (Associate Professor, School of Physics),

Dr. Hamed Fazlollahtabar (Assistant Professor, School of Engineering),

Dr. Ehsan Nazarzadeh Zare (Assistant Professor, School of Chemistry),

Dr. Rasul Mohebbi (Assistant Professor, School of Engineering), and

Dr. Ahmad Gholizadeh (Associate Professor, School of Physics)

 Journal of Holography Applications in Physics (JHAP) covers all areas related to the holographic principle in physics. Holographic principle prepares the powerful tools to study several phenomena in various branches of physics. The aim of JHAP is to collect all applications of holography for the theoretical and experimental communities.

This is to announce that the first issue of the Journal of Holography Applications in Physics (JHAP) is now published by the School of Physics in DU. The issue opens with a paper by Professor Leonard Susskind, a member of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) and a pioneering figure in the String Theory and holography. In his paper, Professor Susskind discusses the holographic formulations of such phenomena as entanglement, chaos, and complexity in the de Sitter space. Other contributions of the first issue of the JHAP are from USA, Argentina, UK, Mexico, India, and Japan.  Dr. Behnam Pourhassan is the Director-in-Charge and Professor Seyed Ahmad Ketabi is the Editor-in-Chief for the journal.

You can access the issue via this link.     

“Lineamenti di diritto pubblico islamico” written by Dr. Ali Reza Jalali, faculty member of the School of Humanities, Damghan University, was published by Irfan Edizioni, a distinguished publisher in Italy.

The book which is written in Italian language analyzes the peculiarities that characterize the phenomenon of the relationship between Public Law and Islam, mainly within the Islamic world, with a historical evolution of legal, constitutional and political thought from the Islamic State of Medina to the Iranian Constitutional Revolution. The aim of the book is to evaluate the legal duality of Islamic Public Law, between democratic principles and divine law and the compatibility of Islam within constitutionalism and modernity. The issue is analyzed in regard to the exercise of power as well as the recognition and protection of rights. The knowledge of an order and the set of specificities that characterize it is the main way to start a future dialogue between cultures, such as to identify the way for the convergence of the models, which, in case, it is argued through an approach due to the constitutional relativism, able to ensure the protection of pluralism, human rights and equality of the individual, without sacrificing the ethical and religious reference of Islamic Law.

The research week of the Iranian academic institutes is held on December 15- 19 annually. DU Research Week is an event that celebrates the excellence of research, innovation and creative inquiry performed by faculty members in every discipline. This event is designed to promote opportunities for faculty members as well as students to discover and engage in research and scholarship. In support of this weeklong effort, schools and departments are encouraged to coordinate activities such as research interest group meetings; workshops for faculty and students; symposia highlighting faculty and student research and scholarship; competitions; oral and poster presentations; award ceremonies and tours of laboratories and libraries.

The first Startup Weekend will be held at Damghan University on 20-22 October. The event starts on Wednesday evening when participants pitch ideas. They then form teams around the top ideas and spend the rest of the weekend validating and building their ideas, aided by mentors. On Friday evening, teams come together and pitch their newly-launched company to a panel of judges. The event is aided by Damghan University.

According to the latest list released by Iran Science Elites Federation (ISEF), the following faculty members from Damghan University are among the top 50 pioneers of science in Iran in 2018.

• Behnam Pourhassan, Assistant Professor of Physics
• Hadi Shafaei Moghaddam, Assistant Professor of Geology

The list including 70 faculty members from Iranian universities nationwide is published annually.