Born on 1^st October 1950, in Tehran, Iran, Ambassador Ali Asghar Soltanieh as nuclear scientist and multilateral diplomat, has been active as participant/guest speaker in over 200 international and regional conferences, specifically on international security, WMD Non-proliferation and Disarmament since 1982.

He has served two times as the Resident Representative to the IAEA (1982-87; 2006-2013). During the first mission to the IAEA, he was simultaneously the Chief Negotiator and Head of Delegation to the United Nations Conference on Promotion of International Cooperation on Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy (PUNE). He has been fully involved in the NPT conferences since 1982.

He served as Ambassador to the United Nations and other International Organizations in Geneva (1999-2002) & Vienna (2006-2013).

While serving in Geneva, he was the Chief Negotiator on the Protocol of Biological Weapons Convention as well as delegate to the Conference of Disarmament (CD).

He was appointed as the Secretary of the National Authority for the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) from 1997 to 1999. During this period, he was entrusted by Member States of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to serve as Facilitator for Negotiation on “Model Facility Agreements” for Verification of Chemical Facilities. In 2016, he was appointed by the Director General of the OPCW as member of the Advisory Team on preparing the history of the OPCW.

He has assumed the positions of President/Chairman of several international conferences and bodies such as UNIDO, IAEA, UNODC, G-77, Non-Aligned Movement, Asian Group, etc. 

Since retirement in 2016, he has been serving, in his personal capacity, as “Senior Evaluation Consultant” at the CTBTO, UNODC, and UNIDO in Vienna. He has also been lecturing and doing research at different universities/research centres/think tanks in several countries in the Middle East, including Arab Centre for Security Studies in Jordan, American University in Beirut and Turkey (Bosporus and TRT), in Europe (Diplomatic Academy, AIES, IIP, Webster University, Nebrija University, etc.) and PIR and CENESS in Russia as well as in Harvard University on “Managing the Atom” project at the Belfer Centre in the USA.

He has published several papers in international journals and books on nuclear physics, the WMD non-proliferation, and disarmaments.

The last but not the least, the Ambassador was appointed by the UNIDIR in 2019, as a member of the Reference Group for the 3-year project on the WMD Free Zone in the Middle East.