Irfan Pathan
Pathan was born 27 October 1984 in Baroda, Gujarat, India and is of Pashtun (Pathan) ancestry, belonging to the Pathan community in Gujarat. He grew up with his elder brother Yusuf in a mosque in Vadodara, in an impoverished family. His father served as the muezzin. Although their parents wished them to become Islamic scholars, Pathan and his brother took an interest in cricket. Their games on the grounds off and inside the mosque often necessitated apologies from their father to Muslim worshippers who visited it. In the beginning his deliveries did not reach the other end of the cricket pitch, but rigorous six-hour training sessions in blazing heat and his family's sense of discipline saw him progress steadily.
Irfan Siddiqi
Siddiqi was born in Karachi, the former capital and largest city of Pakistan, but his family moved to New York City while he was young. He did his schooling at the Bronx High School of Science, Bronx, NY, where he developed a strong interest in physics, chemistry and mathematics. His aptitude in physics and mathematics led him to the Columbia University Science Honors Program. He moved on to Harvard University to complete his undergraduate education, earning an A. B. with distinguished honors (cum laude) in Physics and Chemistry in 1997. Inspired by superconductivity and superconducting circuits during his summer internship at HYPRES, Inc., he enrolled at Yale University for doctoral studies, where his graduate work focused mainly on aluminum hot-electron bolometers. Upon receiving his Ph.D. in 2002, he was awarded a postdoctoral research fellowship at Yale for work on superconducting qubits. His post-doctoral work resulted with the development of the Josephson quantum electron pump or a Josephson Bifurcation Amplifier, which makes use of the non-dissipative, non-linear nature of the Josephson junction to realize high gain and minimal back action measurements of quantum systems. He joined the University of California Berkeley as a physics faculty member in the summer of 2006 and is currently a full professor at the Berkeley Physics department. In 2015, his laboratory was awarded the first-ever UC Berkeley Award for Excellence in Laboratory Safety, awarded by the Berkeley Office of Environment, Health and Safety.