Allah Verdi Mirza Farman Farmaian (1929 – August 28, 2016) was the son of the Qajar Persian nobleman Abdol Hossein Mirza Farmanfarma and his wife Hamdam Khanoum. He studied Biology at Reed College (BA 1952), and obtained an MS (1955) and PhD (1959) in Biological Sciences at Stanford University, where his research focused on marine physiology at Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove, California, as well as in a Post-doctorate fellowship at University of California Berkeley. He did research work in membrane physiology, worked at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and founded the department of Physiology at Shiraz University (Iran, 1961–1967). A prominent academic in the United States, he was a professor and head of the Biology department at Rutgers Univers