Chef Vicky Colas in Authority Magazine:
Is the American Dream still alive? If you speak to many of the immigrants we spoke to, who came to this country with nothing but grit, resilience, and a dream, they will tell you that it certainly is still alive. As a part of our series about immigrant success stories, I had the pleasure of interviewing Mir Imran.
Mir Imran has a unique background in medicine and engineering, which became the foundation of his work in innovation and company building. After attending medical school, Mir began his career as a healthcare entrepreneur in the late 1970’s and has founded more than 20 life sciences companies since those early days, more than half of which have been acquired. Mir holds more than 400 issued and pending patents and is perhaps most well-known for his pioneering contributions to the first FDA-approved Automatic Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator (ICD).
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Can you tell us the story of how you grew up?
I was born in Hyderabad, India, a city right in the center of India. My father was a physician, my mother was a writer. We grew up with my grandmother taking care of us; my father practiced medicine in a small town a couple hundred miles away, so we only used to see my father every summer. It was a really wonderful environment growing up with the family, aunts and uncles and so on. I was a tinkerer from childhood, and I developed a deep interest in engineering — for science, physics and chemistry. My mother encouraged me a lot. In fact, I attribute the fostering of my curiosity to her — when I was a young boy, I liked to take toys apart to figure out how they worked. Instead of scolding me, she bought me two toys … one to play with and one to take apart. That was the beginning of my career in engineering.
More here.