Rashed Hasan has a deep faith in God and shares a deep concern about the welfare of the human race. He was born in a third-world Muslim country but was fortunate to have been educated in some of the finest institutions in the Western world. As he traveled throughout Muslim lands, he saw the poverty, a lack of education, the rise in conservative thinking, and a lack of empowerment and self-governance on a large scale. Yet he was fascinated by the humility and God consciousness of the average person. As he traveled around the Western world, he witnessed vigorous intellectual discourses, unprecedented economic well-being, and awesome technological innovations but was dismayed by the absence of humility, lack of respect for human equality, and the rise of income disparities to an alarming proportion.
Rashed has a long career in industry, management consulting, and technology entrepreneurship. He worked for premier management consulting firms such as Booz Allen Hamilton and Ernst & Young. He has worked for and consulted for major global corporations in the automotive, health-care, energy, media, pharmaceutical, transportation, and building-materials industries, which included companies like Ford Motor, Alyeska Pipeline, Pfizer, Lucas Aerospace, CNN, Monsanto, Westinghouse, and GAF. He cofounded several technology companies in health-care informatics and big-data analytics. He has also established social ventures in Bangladesh in software and health care.
Along the way he has also founded and led a number of faith-based, political-grassroots, youth-leadership, and immigrant-advocacy organizations in the United States in collaboration with the US Department of Justice, the PA Department of Health, the Jewish Healthcare Foundation, the Heinz Endowment, and other philanthropic organizations. He also worked with multinational donor agencies such as USAID, the Swedish Development Fund, IFC, Abu Dhabi Development Fund, and the like for social ventures and nonprofit initiatives.
Rashed lives in Alexandria, Virginia (in the United States), a town known for its historical connection to the American Revolution and George Washington, one of the Founding Fathers. He devotes much of his time to building a technology consulting company and is actively involved in community dialogues and building relationships at professional, personal, and community levels with special attention to and interest in young people who question the world as it is and aspire to change the world to be a better place. When not working, he can be found reading books, traveling, cooking a meal, and gardening (with limited success) alongside his wife, to whom plants are no less dear than her own children.
Rashed has a bachelor of science and a master of science in mechanical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a master of business administration in finance and operations from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA. He also teaches as an adjunct faculty member at George Mason University’s School of Business in Fairfax, Virginia.