Atta Ur Rahman PhD, FRS, FPAS

Atta-ur-Rahman PhD, FRS, FPAS, is a Pakistani scientist specialising in organic chemistry who served as the Chairman of the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan between October 2002 till September 2008 and the Minister for Science and Technology between March 2000 and September 2002. He currently serves as the Chair of the UN Committee on Science and Technology.

After studying chemistry at the University of Karachi, Atta-ur-Rahman travelled to Cambridge, where he received Ph.D and later Sc.D. in organic chemistry. He started teaching as an associate professor in 1974 at the University of Karachi and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Tübingen as part of the German Academic Exchange. He serves as the patron of the Ebrahim Jamal Research Institute of Chemistry at the International Center for Chemical and Biological Sciences and Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at the Karachi University.

Atta-ur-Rahman is acclaimed as one of the leading scientist's in the field of natural product chemistry in South Asia, with over 900 important publications in the field of Organic chemistry, 28 patents and 150 books written or edited, published and circulated internationally by him. He serves as the Editor In Chief of several peer reviewed journals including the Current Medicinal Chemistry and the Natural Product Research. He has been a Fellow of the Royal Society since July 2006 and has served as the President of Pakistan Academy of Sciences. In recognition of his contributions in the field of organic chemistry, he has been conferred with all four civil awards, including Nishan-e-Imtiaz (2002), Hilal-I-Imtiaz (1998), Sitara-I-Imtiaz (1991) and Tamgha-e-Imtiaz (1983). He was the first recipient of the Khwarizmi International Award and the first Muslim to receive the UNESCO Science Prize (1999).