Samar Mubarakmand

Dr. Samar Mubarakmand (Urdu: ثمر مبارک مند) (born September 17, 1942) a Pakistani nuclear scientist, and the current Chairman of Pakistan's National Engineering and Scientific Commission. He has been awarded Pakistan's three highest civil awards, the Nishan-e-Imtiaz, the Hilal-e-Imtiaz and the Sitara-e-Imtiaz. He rose to national fame in May 1998 when he headed the team of Pakistani scientists which conducted the country's successful nuclear tests in Balochistan.

Dr. Mubarakmand received the M.S. degree in Physics from Government College University, Lahore, in 1962, and the Ph.D. in Experimental Nuclear Physics from the University of Oxford, England, in 1966 where he was part of the team which commissioned a 22 million volt atomic accelerator. He has expertise in nuclear instrumentation, nuclear diagnostics, application of lasers, and fibre optics technology.

Dr. Samar Mubarakmand has been associated with a variety of classified scientific programmes in Pakistan. He has reportedly been responsible for a parallel nuclear program in Pakistan that competed with the more famous program run by great scientist Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan. Dr. Mubarakmand has always a much lower profile than Dr. Khan. He joined the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission (PAEC) in 1962, where he was in charge of the Directorate of Technical Development, one of the most secretive institutes within Pakistan involved in clandestine nuclear trade. It was completely unknown to the outside world. He reportedly supervised several cold tests in 1983, and also developed a neutron facility for acceleration of explosion process in a nuclear device. In 1990s, he served as the Director General of National Defence Complex, another Pakistani organization shrouded in secrecy. He was appointed as the first Chairman of Pakistan's National Engineering and Scientific Commission (NESCOM) in 2001. He is now considered the main architect of Pakistan's missile program, which includes systems such as the Babur missile, Shaheen missile series, and the Ghaznavi missile system.

One of his recent landmark achievements is the establishment of Centers of Excellence (COEs) in the fields of Computational Science and Medicine, Control & Instrumentation, Fluid Dynamics & Engineering Design, Hydro Technologies, Wireless Communication, and Electronics and Composite Materials. These COEs are fast becoming the hub of advance scientific and medical activity in Pakistan, conducting research in areas such as stem cells, tissue culture technology, and production of cardiac stents.

Dr. Samar Mubarakmand is widely credited with bringing modernization in the design and development of many components and instruments, which are considered the backbone of Pakistan's nuclear and missile technology.

More Information

Dr Samar Mubarakmand on Geo's Capital Talk [http://pkpolitics.com/2007/12/19/capital-talk-19-december-07/]