Karachi-born Pakistani-American actor Kumail Nanjiani plays Kingo,  one of the title characters in "The Eternals", Marvel's new movie scheduled for release in 2021. Kingo is a 16th century Japanese master swordsman and a film star and producer. The Eternals are a race of immortal superheroes. The movie also stars Angelina Jolie, Salma Hayek, Richard Madden, and Kit Harington.…

President Donald Trump has picked renowned Moroccan-born Muslim American immunologist Dr. Moncef Mohamed Slaoui to  lead  Operation Warp Speed, America's COVID-19 vaccine program. Trump has compared this vaccine effort with the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb in the 1940s.…

Preliminary results of a US Government study reveal that the sunlight quickly destroys COVID19, the novel coronavirus. The study found that the risk of “transmission from surfaces outdoors is lower during daylight” and under higher temperature and humidity conditions, according to Yahoo News. This latest work reinforces the conclusions of "Will Coronavirus Pandemic Diminish by Summer?", a recent paper written…

I have just learned that a close Pakistani-American friend of mine in Silicon Valley is recovering from the disease caused by COVID-19. He’s a 66 years old man. His age and gender put him in a relatively high-risk category for coronavirus infection. When he took his elderly…

Mainstream western and Indian media have widely covered a recent MIT paper by a Pakistani-American scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on the effects of heat and humidity on coronavirus…

Dr. Syra Madad, Pakistani-American head of New York City’s Health and Hospitals System-wide Special Pathogens Program, is featured in a 6-part Netflix documentary series "Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak". She had …

I had a chance to meet well-known Pakistani journalist Sohail Warraich recently during his visit to Silicon Valley. He was here to record an interview with successful Pakistani-American entrepreneur Osman Rashid, founder of Chegg and Kno.

Sohail Warraich is a senior journalist and…

This weekend's Gay Pride Parade in New York City will mark the 50th anniversary of America's Gay Rights Movement. It will feature Tan France, a fashion designer of Pakistani origin who stars in award-winning Netflix series "Queer Eye". Born Tanveer Wasim Safdar in England, Tan France was raised in Doncaster, South Yorkshire in a very strict British Pakistani Muslim household.…

OPEN Forum 2019 drew hundreds of Pakistanis and Pakistani-Americans to Santa Clara Convention Center in Silicon Valley on Saturday April 20, 2019.  This year's conference featured a keynote by Karachi-born Mudassir Sheikha, co-founder of …

Last Saturday, Pakistani-American community joined Javed Ellahie and Sabina Zafar in celebrating their recent election victories in city council elections in San Francisco Bay Area which includes Silicon Valley. Ellahie has been elected to Monte Sereno City Council while Sabina Zafar won a seat on San Ramon City Council in November 2018 elections. The event was organized by American Pakistani Political Action…

Karachi-born Pakistani-American Dr. Irfan Siddiqi is the head of Lawrence Livermore Quantum Computing Lab at the University of California at Berkeley.  He's also one of the architects of the United States Quantum Initiative backed by industry, academia and the federal government.

Silicon Valley Diversity:

Dr. Siddiqi was recently featured on Silicon…

Pakistani-American attorney Javed Ellahie, a long-time resident of Silicon Valley elected as councilman in the city of Monte Sereno, California, was sworn in on Tuesday December 18, 2018. It was a standing-room only event. It celebrated a new diverse city council which saw a Muslim immigrant, a woman and white man replace three white men. Liza Lawler and Shawn Leuthold were also sworn in along with Javed.…

Hundreds of Pakistanis and Pakistani-Americans converged on Santa Clara Convention Center in Silicon Valley on Saturday May 12, 2018 for Open Forum 2018.  The attendees included entrepreneurs, technologists, business executives, investors, lawyers, accountants and others.What was different this year was the presence of an unusually large number of attendees from Pakistan, including dozens of Fulbright…

Dr. Saba Mahmood, professor of anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, passed away on March 10, 2018.  She was only 56 years old when her life was cut short by pancreatic cancer.  She is survived by her husband Professor Charles Hirschkind and son Nameer Hirschkind. Born in Lahore, Pakistan in 1962, she came to the United States in 1981. She received her PhD in anthropology…

Pakistani-American Astrophysicist Dr. Nergis Mavalvala, MIT professor and member of Nobel Prize winner LIGO team, visited Pakistani-American Community Center (PACC) in Silicon Valley on February 24, 2018. She was invited by PACC founder Mr. Mohammad Asghar Aboobaker to talk about her inspirational work and meet with the community members, particularly Pakistani-American children in the…

Nearly half a million people of Pakistani origin call America home. Pakistani-Americans' education and income levels are significantly higher than those of the general population of the United States. Among them are doctors, engineers, lawyers, accountants, journalists, politicians, business executives, professional sports team managers and owners, artists, actors, entrepreneurs, salespeople, policemen, soldiers, convenience store clerks and taxi, bus and truck drivers. United States is the…

The Big Sick, a cross-culture romantic comedy based on actual events,  breaks new ground by casting a brown-skinned Pakistani-American in a lead role in a movie produced and widely screened in the United States. Acquired by Amazon Studios for $12 million after a bidding war at Sundance film festival, the film has already grossed over $25 million so far.…

Cisco is paying $610 million to acquire Viptela, a software-defined-networks (SDN) start-up in Silicon Valley that was co-founded in 2012 by Pakistani-American entrepreneurs Amir Khan, Atif Khan and Khalid Raza.

Software defined network (SDN) technology allows network managers to configure, manage, secure, and optimize network…

Open Forum 2017, the annual conference of Pakistani entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, drew over 1,000 attendees, about half of them women. It featured presentations by successful entrepreneurs including Ahmad Khaishgi of SquareTrade and Mudassir Sheikha of Careem as well as sessions by powerful venture capitalists like Aaref Hilaly of Sequoia Capital. It is organized by the Organization of…

Washington D.C. based AI technology firm Afiniti, founded by serial Pakistani-American entrepreneur Zia Chishti, has filed for initial public offering (IPO) at $1.6 billion valuation, according to VentureBeat.

Zia Chishti founded his first company Align Technology in 1997 in …