Biography | Kam Ghaffarian — The Engineering Hall Where an 18-Year-Old From Isfahan Took a U.S. Degree

Kamal S. Ghaffarian arrived in Washington in 1976 from Isfahan with a loan from an uncle and a plan to study engineering.

Forbes later put the sum at two thousand dollars.

He parked cars at night in downtown Washington while he finished a double course of study at The Catholic University of America.

The engineering school had moved into Pangborn Hall in 1962.

That building, on the Brookland campus off Michigan Avenue NE, is still the home of the College of Engineering, Physics, and Computing.

Ghaffarian took a bachelor of science in computer science and engineering here and graduated in 1980.

The date matters.

The Iranian Revolution had closed the path home the year before.

He stayed, added an electronics degree at what is now Capitol Technology University in 1983, and later an information-management master's at George Washington University.

Catholic University's own engineering history page records the Pangborn move and the school's long NASA research thread, including work that began in the 1960s.

Ghaffarian's first space job came after this campus, not on it.

But this is where the immigrant student became an American engineer, three miles north of the Capitol, in a hall that still teaches the same trade.

He became a U.S. citizen in 1989.

The later companies — Stinger Ghaffarian Technologies, X-energy, Intuitive Machines, Axiom Space — sit on that 1980 degree and the decision to remain after the revolution.

Stand on the Michigan Avenue side of Pangborn and the story is smaller than the later moon landing.

It is a student who paid the loan by parking cars and walked into this building until the degree was done.

Photo: World Economic Forum, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (portrait, 2024). Campus building from the public street.