Mohammad Hossein Sarmadi, an ICTP researcher, passed away on Saturday 9 October 2010 in Trieste. Hossein was born in September 1953 in Iran where he also went through his school education.

Hossein then studied at the University of Pittsburg for his undergraduate de- gree, where he also obtained his Ph.D. in high energy physics in 1982. He was at ICTP for his first post-doctoral position from 1983 to 1985 and subsequently held postdoctoral positions at Rutherford Laboratory in U.K. and CERN, Geneva. He returned to ICTP as a Senior Research Scientist from 1991 to 1997 and later as a Senior Research Associate from 2000 to 2006. He also spent some time at the Institute for Studies in Theoretical Physics and Mathematics (IPM), Teheran, Iran.

During his research career he wrote several important and influential papers in the area of string theory, for example on Toroidal and Asymmetric Orbifold compactifications of string theory as well as on Bound states of D-branes.

He strongly contributed to the ICTP Diploma program and supervised several Diploma students over many years.