She left Iran as a refugee in 1986, arriving in Germany with her mother while the rest of the family stayed behind. Today she is a senior marketing executive in global tech. In between she became the founding executive director of the Farhang Foundation and started Butterfly Buzz to push Iranian artists and musicians forward — proof that a career and a calling can occupy the same working week.

By day he is a senior software engineer with a master's in software engineering and two decades of building systems for other people. The rest of his hours go to the Persian Cultural Center of San Diego, which he now leads as president — a magazine that keeps coming out, a Persian school teaching children born in California, Nowruz every year. Institutions like that are why a community still exists once its founders move on.

A psychotherapist and licensed marriage and family therapist in California, she built a method of her own — Awareness Integration — rather than working only inside the ones she was taught, and founded an institute around it. She lectures at CSULB, hosts a radio show and a podcast, and has spent much of her working life doing what this community has historically found difficult: talking in public about what goes on inside people's heads.