Aza Rakhmanova or Aza Hasanovna Rakhmanova was a Russian AIDS and Hepatitis expert. She was credited with organizing AIDS prevention and control in St. Petersburg. She was one of the first to be treating HIV in the Soviet Union in 1987.
Azadeh Moaveni is an Iranian-American writer, journalist, and academic. She directs the Gender and Conflict Program at the International Crisis Group, and lectures on journalism at New York University's London campus. She is the author of four books, including the bestselling Lipstick Jihad and Guest House for Young Widows, which was shortlisted for numerous prizes. She contributes to The New York Times, The Guardian, and The London Review of Books.
Azar Nafisi is an Iranian-American writer and professor of English literature. Born in Tehran, Iran, she has resided in the United States since 1997 and became a U.S. citizen in 2008.
Azariah ben Moses dei Rossi was an Italian-Jewish physician and scholar. He was born at Mantua in c. 1511; and died in 1578. He was descended from an old Jewish family which, according to a tradition, was brought by Titus from Jerusalem. He was known among Jews as Azariah min-Ha'adumim, a play on his name as well as a possible allusion to the fact that he lived in Catholic Italy, Rome being regarded as a spiritual heir of Esau. Combining an insatiable desire for learning with remarkable mental power, Dei Rossi early in life became exceptionally proficient in Hebrew, Latin, and Italian literature. He studied simultaneously medicine, archeology, history, Greek and Roman antiquities, and Christian ecclesiastical history. When about the age of thirty he married and settled for a time at Ferrara. Later he was found at Ancona, Bologna, Sabbionetta, and again at Ferrara. In 1570 a terrible earthquake visited the last-named city and caused the death of about 200 persons. The house in which Dei Rossi lived was partly destroyed; but it happened that at the moment he and his wife were in their daughter's room, which remained uninjured. During the disturbances consequent upon the earthquake Dei Rossi lived in an outlying village, where he was thrown into association with a Christian scholar, who asked him if there existed a Hebrew translation of the Letter of Aristeas. Dei Rossi answered in the negative, but in twenty days he prepared the desired translation, which he entitled Hadrat Zekenim. His account of the earthquake, written shortly after, is entitled Kol Elohim; he regarded the earthquake as a visitation of God, and not merely as a natural phenomenon.
Azary Abramovich Lapidus is chairman of SUIholding. He graduated in 1980 from Moscow State University of Civil Engineering. In 1997, he was awarded Medal "In Commemoration of the 850th Anniversary of Moscow".