The Council on Persian Culture (cPc) under the auspices of the California Zoroastrian Center (cZc) has awarded Scholarships for Academic Achievements sponsored by the Erach and Roshan Sadri Foundation and the Massiah Foundation through the World Zoroastrian Organisation offices in London.

This has been a group effort between various organizations and individuals across the continents for the common goal and objective of encouraging Zoroastrian students who have historically been extremely successful anywhere in the world to excel even more in the advancement of science in general and their academic achievements in particular.

Special thanks are extended to many highly competent and truly motivated Zoroastrian students who applied for the Scholarships from US, Europe, India, Pakistan, Iran and South East Asia. The scholarship committee has evaluated the full documentations of each and all applicants, based on the merit of each student, and the following four applicants were selected to be the recipients of the Massiah Scholarships and Erach and Roshan Sadri Foundation Scholarships. Each will receive a sum of US $5,000 towards their educational advancements for a total of US $20,000.

Ms Shireen Farhad Cama – Harvard University medical school, Yale University; BA with honors. Federation of Zoroastrian Association of North America scholar. Zoroastrian Association of Greater New York scholar. Paul Dudley White Traveling Fellowship and seminar in Global Health Equity, Share and Care Foundation Fellowship, Richter Fellowship, Heinz Family Scholarship, Yale Club of Pittsburgh Scholarship.
Ms Natasha Irani Demehri – University of Florida, Biological Sciences, Director of health policy; American Medical Student Association, Work of Heart award; UF collegiate organization of the year, Golden key international honors society, 1st place; Orange county regional science & engineering fair.
Ms Venus Vakhshoori – El Camino Real High School, 1st place US Academic Decathlon Division 1. Nation’s highest scoring student. Honors; overall US Academic scholarship winner. Honors; overall Hilton scholarship.
Mr Neekaan Oshidary – Stanford psychophysiology and clinical immunology, the Stephen Gerry memorial science award winner for outstanding performance in Chemistry. Honors; Saint Francis academic achievement. Elks national foundation, most valuable student scholarship award.

The award ceremony took place at California Zoroastrian Center on Yalda night, December 15th 2007. A four member panel headed by Professor Nasrin Rahimieh chose the winners and she introduced them to the audience.

Mr Maseeh, a philanthropist, presented the awards to two Parsi students, Shireen Cama and Natasha Demehri for their achievements. Dhunmai Dalal representing the WZO, presented the awards to two of the Iranian students, Venus Vakhshoori and Neekaan Oshidary for their accomplishments.

Dhunmai spoke for the WZO and the ERSF on this evening, thanking the CZC for hosting the event. She showed her appreciation to the Massiah Foundation for their generosity and introduced the ERSF who contributed generously through the auspices of the WZO and to the joint donation to this scholarship award. She also gave a brief history of the WZO – its formation during the Iranian Revolution for emergency aid to Zoroastrians and its transition into a world organization for charitable work and timely aid in the areas of education, poor relief, healthcare, construction, maintenances, housing and emergency relief in the case of natural disasters. She appealed to the gathering for their continued support and donations.
Dhunmai congratulated the awardees and wished them well in the future.