On a beach in Tunis, a young man helped a toddler retrieve a ball floating in the waves. That simple act triggered a lifetime of connections for Mohamed Chikhaoui, who helps students from Cambridge, Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East share the intellectual wealth and spirit of MIT.
Chikhaoui was in high school when he retrieved that child’s toy. The boy’s parents, it turned out, were American cultural attachés working for USAID. They asked if he’d considered attending college in the United States. “I just laughed,” he recalls. But the envoys arranged for scholarship assistance, and Chikhaoui came to Cambridge, where his soccer skills helped the MIT team become “one of the finest in New England,” according to the Tech. In the spring of 1965, at the invitation of the State Department, Chikhaoui taught an orientation for Peace Corps volunteers headed to his homeland. “For me this was an unforgettable, positive experience,” he says. “These were bright young people who were really eager to travel to other countries and learn about other cultures and help wherever they could.”
After studying electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, Chikhaoui earned a bachelor’s degree in economics at La Sorbonne. He worked in health services engineering in Paris, where he met his wife, and then in Germany. Next he moved to Saudi Arabia, where he helped engineer the nation’s modern hospital infrastructure.
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