Mayshan Ghiassi’s recent move from Jacksonville, Florida to Chattanooga represents only the most recent leg of a remarkable journey.
A neurosurgeon, Ghiassi joined CHI Memorial Hospital’s Stroke and Neuroscience Center earlier this year. Trained at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, he’d worked previously in Arkansas, Kentucky and most recently, Florida.
But his story begins in Iran, where he was born in 1979, during that country’s Islamic revolution. Because his family was of the Baha’i faith, they became religious refugees, fleeing the country when he was a child.
“Mom was a schoolteacher in Iran and dad was a mechanic,” he says. “They both valued education and instilled that in my (younger) brother and me, to make something of the opportunity we’d been given after the life experience we’d had.”