TEHRAN –Four Iranian women namely Azam Karami, Mahvash Abyari, Marzieh Ebrahimi, and Seyedeh Fateme Hosseini have been chosen among the winners of the BRICS Women’s Startups Contest 2024.

The event, which aims to spotlight and support women-led startups across BRICS nations and beyond, was launched in June and extended until October 5.

The contest’s international panel of judges considered more than 1,000 applications from 30 countries. 

The contest winners included 26 projects in such areas as innovation in energy and infrastructure facilities; artificial intelligence technologies in medicine, education, agriculture, and the aviation industry; the fight against cancer and infertility; and robotics.

Iranian women rank second in terms of the number of winners in startups contest following Russia. 

Karami received the award in the nomination ‘Artificial Intelligence’ for her project titled ‘Automatic Fault Detection in Power Transmission Lines’.

The award in the nomination ‘Health and Medicine’ went to Abyari, and Ebrahimi for their projects named ‘Insightfully scanned glucose monitoring’ and ‘Immune cell bank for the treatment of cancer and autoimmune diseases’, respectively.

Hosseini received the award in the nomination ‘Innovation and Infrastructure’ with her project called ‘Intelligent spoon for tremor alleviation’. 

Promoting women’s entrepreneurship and unleashing leadership, ensuring the expansion of women’s business networks in the BRICS countries are among the main goals of the contest.

It also aims to deepen B2B cooperation among women entrepreneurs, increase the participation of women in the BRICS countries’ economies, and create multilateral projects.

The inclusion of women’s businesses in global value chains is another goal of the contest. 

The general partner of the BRICS Women’s Business Alliance series of events is Sberbank PJSC, Russia’s largest bank, and a leading global financial institution. 

The strategic partner of the Contest is another leader of Russia’s banking industry Gazprombank (Joint Stock Company).

Startups from 14 countries will receive communication support from the BRICS Women’s Business Alliance. 

Female scholars 

Some 135 out of 938 Iranian researchers who have been recognized among the world’s top one percent most-cited researchers in 2023 are female scholars.

In 2023, 938 top researchers affiliated with Iranian organizations have been identified, which shows a 12 percent increase compared to the previous year. Over the past decade, the number of highly-cited researchers in the country has been growing.

Women are an important part of society, playing an important role in the development of human societies, IRNA quoted Ahmad Fazelzadeh, the head of the Islamic World Science and Technology Monitoring and Citation (ISC) Institute, as saying.

One of the indicators of scientific authority is the number of highly cited scientists in each country, and Iranian women researchers have a special place in the field of scientific authority at the national and international level, Fazelzadeh added.

Among Iranian highly-cited researchers, women are also present and have played their part in the scientific authority of Iran.

Using the data indexed in the ISC database, ISC identifies highly cited Iranian researchers in Human Sciences, Social Sciences, Art, and Architecture.

In the latest announced list, highly cited researchers have been introduced in the period of 10 years (2011-2021). The criteria for selecting researchers in this list is the number of citations made to their scientific productions.

According to the recent report of ISC, in the list of one percent of researchers in the world which is based on the Essential Science Indicators  (ESI) database, a total of 135 Iranian female researchers have been recognized in the areas of Agricultural Sciences, Clinical Medicine, Biology, Biochemistry, Chemistry, Pharmacology and Toxicology, Neuroscience and Psychology, Engineering, Material Science, Psychiatry/Psychology, Computer Science, Interdisciplinary, Social Science, generalities and some have obtained the necessary points even in several fields.

MT/MG