Career
Abbasi-Davani has regularly been linked to Iran's efforts to make the nuclear weapon, a process called weaponization. According to an ISIS report citing an expert close to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Abbasi-Davani was a key scientist in the Iranian covert nuclear weapons program headed by Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a strong supporter of Iran's nuclear weapons program. Abbasi-Davani personally directed work to calculate the yield of a nuclear weapon as well as work on high energy neutron sources, this expert added.
According to the same report, the IAEA has information that Abbasi-Davani was the head of the Institute of Applied Physics (IAP), which was a follow-on organization to the Physics Research Center. Both of the organizations acted as fronts for scientific work on a possible Iranian nuclear weapons program.
According to Mashreghnews, an Iranian news website, he holds a PhD in nuclear physics and did nuclear research at the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI). Prior to his appointment as head of the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran (AEOI), he chaired the physics department at Tehran's Imam Hossein University, which has been linked to the IRGC and work on nuclear weaponization.
On 29 November 2010, he survived an assassination attempt. A separate bomb attack the same day killed another scientist, Dr. Majid Shahriari, who also taught at Shahid Beheshti University.