Khosrow B. Semnani
Khosrow B. Semnani is an Iranian-American industrialist, community leader, and philanthropist based in Salt Lake City.
He was born in 1947 in Iran, studied English in England in 1966, and traveled to the United States. He eventually arrived in Salt Lake City, Utah, and graduated from Westminster College with a Bachelor of Science Degree in Physical Sciences in 1972. He received a Master of Engineering Administration degree from the University of Utah in 1975.
Semnani began his career working as a research scientist at Kennecott Copper Corporation. He also worked as a plant engineer for Thatcher Chemical Company, and then as an engineering manager at Sperry Univac (later Unisys).
Using his expertise in physics and industry management, Semnani started Utah’s first hazardous waste disposal facility at Grassy Mountain. After he sold that facility, he founded Envirocare in 1988. Envirocare was the first privately-owned low-level nuclear waste disposal facility in the United States. In 2004, after 16 years of growth and profitability, he sold the company, which later became Energy Solutions. Through his company, S. K. Hart Management, he manages a diversified global investment portfolio.
To share their good fortune with others, Semnani, with his wife, Ghazaleh, founded the Semnani Family Foundation in 1993. The foundation works with a wide variety of organizations to provide humanitarian relief across the globe. The foundation also founded the Maliheh Free Clinic in 2005 to provide free healthcare to thousands of uninsured poor people in the Salt Lake City area.
Semnani founded Omid for Iran in 2009 to encourage policies that protected the people of Iran and promoted their liberty. He wrote The Ayatollah’s Nuclear Gamble: The Human Cost of Military Strikes Against Iran’s Nuclear Facilities, published in 2012 in partnership with the Hinckley Institute of Politics at the University of Utah. In October 2018, he published Where Is My Oil? Corruption in Iran’s Oil and Gas Sector, also in partnership with the Hinckley Institute.
Semnani lives in Salt Lake City with his wife and three sons.
