Dr. Asif Siddiqi was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh in 1966 and was educated in Bangladesh and the United Kingdom. He is the son of Professor Hafiz G. A. Siddiqi, the Vice-Chancellor North South University and Professor Najma Siddiqi of Jahangirnagar University. He graduated as an Electrical Engineer from Texas A&M University. He received his Ph. D. in the History of Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA in 2004.
Asif was the first South Asian to receive a number of the highest honors from NASA, the American space agency. In 2000, his book "Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945- 1947" was published by the NASA History Office. The book has received a number of important awards including the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) award for the best book on space exploration and the American Astronautical Society's Eugene Emme Award. Since 2000, he has received the most prestigious fellowships in the U. S. A. including from the National Science Foundation(NSF), the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), the American Historical Association (AHA), and the Smithsonian Institution for his work on the history of spaceflight. He is currently a research fellow at Harvard University's American Academy of Arts & Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts and continues work for NASA. A reception in his honor was held at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC on March 14, 2005 for his work on a new NASA- sponsored project ("Rockets and People") on the history of spaceflight during the Cold War.
