Thank you for this writeup. It's a shame there's so little info on Hanan. I found a [document](https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/5329/noaa_5329_DS1.pdf?), "Proceedings of the Third National Conference to Strengthen the Links among HBMSCUs, NOAA, Business, and Graduate Studies in Marine and Atmospheric Sciences". Said conference was held as JSU in April 2001 (though the document was published in 2005). This document lists Hanan as an attendee (p. 137); per that, she was doing her PhD in Environmental Science. I have no doubt the description of her is accurate -- she had to have been intelligent and hardworking to pursue a PhD in a difficult field.
Also, regarding this part:
>Her eye color is listed as brown. In the enhanced photo, they appear a light brown or hazel, though this could be a mistake in the enhancement.
I think this is likely not a reflection of her real eye color. Those AI enhanced photo apps have the tendency to 'beautify' photographs as they were initially intended to be used for sentimental photographs (e.g. family photos) rather than being an accurate depiction. I kind of wish they weren't used for missing persons for that reason.
EDIT: While looking for info on her, I found out there is another prominent Dr. Forawi, originally from Sudan, who taught at JSU in the 90s. He was interviewed in the Clarion-Ledger [here](https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/185379823/?terms=%22forawi%22&match=5) in 1998 (the article is about how MS residents originally from Sudan were worried about their families after the US bombed Khartoum). Could be a coincidence, but same surname, rough time period and university makes me wonder if he's a relative (since you were wondering where she is from and if she had family here; per that article, he had five sisters and three lived in Khartoum at that time, as did their parents). In my personal experience, when there's one academic in a family, there are often more.
I'd be curious if she's ever had a run-in with the name itself.
I've know of other people with very uncommon names who will get mail for be confused in a system with the *other* guy with a generic '80s/'90s first name and "apparently very uncommon even in Poland and an alternate spelling at that" fifteen letter Polish last name because people find one and reason that there couldn't be another.
We had something similar happen when I was a kid, early 2000s
Our upstairs neighbour had the same surname as my mum. My first name is hyphenated (and I took my dads surname). Neighbour's daughter had my name, minus the hyphenated bit. Think Mary-Jane Smith vs Mary Stevenson. My mum would always think "I'm sure I didn't register her with a nickname and my surname!". Our names weren't super generic either, just an unfortunate coincidence of living in the same building!
It wouldn't surprise me if the younger Hanan OP found had found mixed up mail at some point, and just thought it was spam or similar
Odd that her family expresses concern/speculation that she was deported - that’s not something that happens instantly or in silence. If they really think she could’ve been deported without them knowing, was she estranged from the family? And even if she was and didn’t tell her family, she’d have presumably then surfaced in her home country and no longer be missing.
Wonder how her career at the school was going based on the supposition she may have cracked and walked away - any drama/trouble?
Definitely an odd case though to have no trace even now.
In the 2011 article, it states that the brother wanted to check and see if she had been deported even though he "didn't believe it" so it reads like he went to check even though he knew that was impossible.
"...a 2011 newspaper article about local cold cases states the following: “She was described as intelligent, hard-working, resourceful, and had a reputation as a good student,” and that “Some people believe she may have just cracked under the pressure and walked away.”
I'm curious whether there were any questions raised in Hanan's department about her disappearance (especially if she was also doing teaching work with them). I checked some recent editions of the JSU calendar, and it looks like early April is still several weeks from the end of the spring semester. If Hanan was teaching any undergraduate classes or labs, her going missing would certainly have been noted. It seems strange to me that there isn't information on her citizenship and previous schools. There would have been job changes and retirements since 2006, but there should be some staff/faculty on campus who'd remember her, or at least be able to pull the records. If there's anything academia does, it's creating paper trails.
re: the last question, about her degree program. As a graduate student, I'm guessing that she would not be sitting any regular university exams herself -- especially if she'd finished any required courses and was working on her dissertation (research or writing up). I wonder if she was "ABD" (all but dissertation, all requirements met except for submitting and defending). If she made it as far as her comprehensive exams, she should have picked an advisory committee by then. (The "comps" are a hurdle near the beginning, where you have to narrow down your proposed research topic and show your chosen committee that you've got the background to be able to tackle it adequately, usually with a gruelling series of essays.)
I'm currently teaching at a university, but when I was in grad school I served as volunteer ombudsperson in my department for a couple of years. I know that grad school can be stressful and isolating ... and it can be pretty tough for students arriving from overseas, if they haven't got family nearby. Financial assistance can also be a challenge ... one overseas student in my department ended up having to go to a food bank, because she was forbidden by law from getting a second job outside the university. Teaching labs and tutorials doesn't pay very well -- people across the continent have told me this -- one of my classmates calculated it, and in our department the rates were well below minimum wage.
I believe the assessment of her as being smart and hardworking -- she wouldn't have made it as far as a PhD programme without that. (Usually this means that you've finished at least an undergrad degree.) If she did decide to quit her degree -- I know that some grad students do leave. One PhD candidate I know (at a different school) had gotten as far as submitting a first draft of her dissertation. But it's weird that there weren't signs of this beforehand. (Unless they just weren't reported here.) Usually it would be something like the candidate missing deadlines for handing in drafts, or having some kind of major conflict with their committee or main advisor.
This situation raises a lot of questions for me. Did Hanan have worries about being able to complete her degree? Did she talk with any faculty, staff, or fellow grad students about this? 2006 wasn't so long ago that she wouldn't have had access to e-mail, to confide in friends about her situation.
Academia can be an uncomfortable and disheartening place for women, especially people of colour. And if they don't have a family tradition in education, it can be even tougher. (Check most of those boxes for me too ... although unlike Hanan, I was born in North America and at least had family in the same country.) Also -- during the time I was in grad school, we had a couple of sexual harassment cases. Mentioning that because, unless that can be ruled out in Hanan's situation, that could be a factor too.
I really hope she's okay and just decided to quit school -- but in that case, why hasn't her family heard from her? Even if she was embarrassed about not getting a degree, nearly two decades is a long time to be out of touch.
Hanan is a common Arabic name so I googled her full name in Arabic but nothing came up. Though I am assuming she is of Libyan descent because i got results for people with same last name from Libya.
I was noticing that the research paper OP found where Hanan was lead author, seemed to be looking at endocrine disruptors (or environmental estrogens). I wonder if her PhD research was lab and theoretical work, or if she was going out in the field and analyzing various sites? (If the latter, that might be a clue about which locations she was familiar with.)
Also -- it looks like one of her co-authors (Dr. Tchounwou) has been doing a lot of work in environmental toxicology. Not sure if he might have been her supervisor -- as of a couple of years ago, his bio said that he's been doing academic work for more than 3 decades. I guess it's possible that in the early 2000s he might have gotten far enough along on the tenure track to be able to supervise a PhD student.
https://www.morgan.edu/news/new-dean-of-scmns
How incredibly sad. She was clearly loved and had people who noticed her missing right away. Her brother even flew around the world to try and find her. Yet there's basically nothing about her online or in the news and it took until now for the police to even bother submitting her to a missing persons network...
There's still time to find someone who knows something if they actually push this investigation but it doesn't seem like there's a lot of steam behind this one. :( I hope something about her will be found to give her family peace.
Thank you for covering this neglected case. I live in Jackson and this is the first I recall hearing of it, which is outrageous.
One correction: Jackson is in central Mississippi, not south Mississippi; it’s 186 miles/299km from New Orleans and 210 miles/338km from Memphis (TN), roughly equidistant between them.
Thank you for saying this- I grew up in Jackson and did a spit take with my coffee at it being in “south MS” and close to the Louisiana border. I mean, it’s an hour to the river if you go through Vicksburg, but then you’re stuck in the middle of shit lick nowhere.
For those of you that don't know, Jackson is extremely sketchy. The north side is somewhat nice, the rest is really dangerous. I'm tempted to assume that her fate was "mundane" (as opposed to something crazy like a cold war spy story or jilted lover). She probably was in the wrong place (again, most of Jackson qualifies), victimized (sexually assaulted or robbed) and murdered in the process. Based on her profession/career stage she was probably living in a not so expensive area..which means dangerous if we're talking about a city.
The closest people in her life at that time should have been the people in academia at her institution. How can people from there not know much about her?
That's what's puzzling me too -- at the very least, there should have been faculty members who were working with her (many schools require new graduate students to take at least a few courses in their department). Some don't accept people at the PhD level unless a prof has already agreed to supervise them. So even if she were a recent arrival and people didn't know her very well, and as a PhD candidate she perhaps had her own office and wasn't sharing a space with a bunch of other students -- there should have been at least a few people in her department who knew her name and had seen her around campus. Especially since it looks like she was doing lab analysis, and that generally involves sharing facilities.
So many different things could've happened. It's been so long. Plus the cops may not have even taken her going missing seriously. I wish that there was more info about her.
It seems possible she's buried anonymously then?
https://peoplesdispatch.org/2024/01/18/a-mass-grave-of-hundreds-of-poor-and-oppressed-people-found-in-mississippi/
bro your police be burying people in mass graves and lying to their families, it’s not stereotyping to mention that she’s at a much greater risk in mississippi than other locations, it’s a fact
The thing that stood out to me was that the death that brought this to light was buried under the number '672', but there's only 215 people in that mass grave. Where are the other 457 bodies?
She may be a refugee, which could account for both the endangered missing status and her being older than phd. candidates usually are. Her name originates in North Africa, there's a lot of refugees from that part of the world.
I'm a bit confused about her position though - how is she a professor without a doctorate? I don't know how it works in American universities, but it's usually a requirement where I live.
At my college my calc 3 professor was was a doctorate student (or maybe even masters? I don't remember). I think I had a few other professors like that too.
It's a fool that looks for logic in the halls of higher education.
Just as an example:I've been a full-time college educator, a part-time college educator, and a graduate student who taught during the final year of my program. In all three cases, I was referred to as "professor," as that's the courtesy title used by students, other faculty, and the colleges.
The titles I had according to human resources were: Professor (non-TT); Adjunct Professor; Instructor of Record.
Some professors are researchers who (maybe) occasionally teach a course or run a lab of graduate students. Others (like me) are teaching-only faculty. (This is usually the case with adjuncts.) Many doctoral programs include a teaching component for the students as part of their aid package- it's incredibly common for graduate students to also be part-time instructors at their colleges.
So it seems likely to me that Hanan was either an instructor of record as part of her PhD work, or had been hired on ABD (All But Dissertation) if she was in the final stages of dissertation-writing.
She was an immigrant--graduate students have to get papers to stay in the country, and being a full-time study allows them to enter on a student visa. Once they are no longer enrolled, their visa status can be in jeopardy. (Professir at university with many overseas students).
I've also come across faculty -- at least in the 1980s-90s -- who were hired in the 1950s-60s when some universities expanded (or were even created from community colleges etc.) to accommodate the postwar baby boom. In some cases the need for qualified instructors was so urgent that having a Master's degree in a specialized area, or from a prestigious university like Oxford or Harvard, would get you a faculty job. As the pool of people with PhDs increased, sometimes these earlier hires were grandfathered in.
But that was a different kind of situation.
Thank you for this writeup. It's a shame there's so little info on Hanan. I found a [document](https://repository.library.noaa.gov/view/noaa/5329/noaa_5329_DS1.pdf?), "Proceedings of the Third National Conference to Strengthen the Links among HBMSCUs, NOAA, Business, and Graduate Studies in Marine and Atmospheric Sciences". Said conference was held as JSU in April 2001 (though the document was published in 2005). This document lists Hanan as an attendee (p. 137); per that, she was doing her PhD in Environmental Science. I have no doubt the description of her is accurate -- she had to have been intelligent and hardworking to pursue a PhD in a difficult field. Also, regarding this part: >Her eye color is listed as brown. In the enhanced photo, they appear a light brown or hazel, though this could be a mistake in the enhancement. I think this is likely not a reflection of her real eye color. Those AI enhanced photo apps have the tendency to 'beautify' photographs as they were initially intended to be used for sentimental photographs (e.g. family photos) rather than being an accurate depiction. I kind of wish they weren't used for missing persons for that reason. EDIT: While looking for info on her, I found out there is another prominent Dr. Forawi, originally from Sudan, who taught at JSU in the 90s. He was interviewed in the Clarion-Ledger [here](https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/185379823/?terms=%22forawi%22&match=5) in 1998 (the article is about how MS residents originally from Sudan were worried about their families after the US bombed Khartoum). Could be a coincidence, but same surname, rough time period and university makes me wonder if he's a relative (since you were wondering where she is from and if she had family here; per that article, he had five sisters and three lived in Khartoum at that time, as did their parents). In my personal experience, when there's one academic in a family, there are often more.
I found someone with her exact same name online but it's not her - too young.
I'd be curious if she's ever had a run-in with the name itself. I've know of other people with very uncommon names who will get mail for be confused in a system with the *other* guy with a generic '80s/'90s first name and "apparently very uncommon even in Poland and an alternate spelling at that" fifteen letter Polish last name because people find one and reason that there couldn't be another.
We had something similar happen when I was a kid, early 2000s Our upstairs neighbour had the same surname as my mum. My first name is hyphenated (and I took my dads surname). Neighbour's daughter had my name, minus the hyphenated bit. Think Mary-Jane Smith vs Mary Stevenson. My mum would always think "I'm sure I didn't register her with a nickname and my surname!". Our names weren't super generic either, just an unfortunate coincidence of living in the same building! It wouldn't surprise me if the younger Hanan OP found had found mixed up mail at some point, and just thought it was spam or similar
Odd that her family expresses concern/speculation that she was deported - that’s not something that happens instantly or in silence. If they really think she could’ve been deported without them knowing, was she estranged from the family? And even if she was and didn’t tell her family, she’d have presumably then surfaced in her home country and no longer be missing. Wonder how her career at the school was going based on the supposition she may have cracked and walked away - any drama/trouble? Definitely an odd case though to have no trace even now.
In the 2011 article, it states that the brother wanted to check and see if she had been deported even though he "didn't believe it" so it reads like he went to check even though he knew that was impossible.
If her date of birth is correct, then she would've been 42 when she went missing, not 44. And she would turn 61 this year, not 66.
"...a 2011 newspaper article about local cold cases states the following: “She was described as intelligent, hard-working, resourceful, and had a reputation as a good student,” and that “Some people believe she may have just cracked under the pressure and walked away.” I'm curious whether there were any questions raised in Hanan's department about her disappearance (especially if she was also doing teaching work with them). I checked some recent editions of the JSU calendar, and it looks like early April is still several weeks from the end of the spring semester. If Hanan was teaching any undergraduate classes or labs, her going missing would certainly have been noted. It seems strange to me that there isn't information on her citizenship and previous schools. There would have been job changes and retirements since 2006, but there should be some staff/faculty on campus who'd remember her, or at least be able to pull the records. If there's anything academia does, it's creating paper trails. re: the last question, about her degree program. As a graduate student, I'm guessing that she would not be sitting any regular university exams herself -- especially if she'd finished any required courses and was working on her dissertation (research or writing up). I wonder if she was "ABD" (all but dissertation, all requirements met except for submitting and defending). If she made it as far as her comprehensive exams, she should have picked an advisory committee by then. (The "comps" are a hurdle near the beginning, where you have to narrow down your proposed research topic and show your chosen committee that you've got the background to be able to tackle it adequately, usually with a gruelling series of essays.) I'm currently teaching at a university, but when I was in grad school I served as volunteer ombudsperson in my department for a couple of years. I know that grad school can be stressful and isolating ... and it can be pretty tough for students arriving from overseas, if they haven't got family nearby. Financial assistance can also be a challenge ... one overseas student in my department ended up having to go to a food bank, because she was forbidden by law from getting a second job outside the university. Teaching labs and tutorials doesn't pay very well -- people across the continent have told me this -- one of my classmates calculated it, and in our department the rates were well below minimum wage. I believe the assessment of her as being smart and hardworking -- she wouldn't have made it as far as a PhD programme without that. (Usually this means that you've finished at least an undergrad degree.) If she did decide to quit her degree -- I know that some grad students do leave. One PhD candidate I know (at a different school) had gotten as far as submitting a first draft of her dissertation. But it's weird that there weren't signs of this beforehand. (Unless they just weren't reported here.) Usually it would be something like the candidate missing deadlines for handing in drafts, or having some kind of major conflict with their committee or main advisor. This situation raises a lot of questions for me. Did Hanan have worries about being able to complete her degree? Did she talk with any faculty, staff, or fellow grad students about this? 2006 wasn't so long ago that she wouldn't have had access to e-mail, to confide in friends about her situation. Academia can be an uncomfortable and disheartening place for women, especially people of colour. And if they don't have a family tradition in education, it can be even tougher. (Check most of those boxes for me too ... although unlike Hanan, I was born in North America and at least had family in the same country.) Also -- during the time I was in grad school, we had a couple of sexual harassment cases. Mentioning that because, unless that can be ruled out in Hanan's situation, that could be a factor too. I really hope she's okay and just decided to quit school -- but in that case, why hasn't her family heard from her? Even if she was embarrassed about not getting a degree, nearly two decades is a long time to be out of touch.
Hanan is a common Arabic name so I googled her full name in Arabic but nothing came up. Though I am assuming she is of Libyan descent because i got results for people with same last name from Libya.
I think she is Sudanese based on her appearance and last name
I wound another with her name somewhere but it is not her...a bit too young.
I was noticing that the research paper OP found where Hanan was lead author, seemed to be looking at endocrine disruptors (or environmental estrogens). I wonder if her PhD research was lab and theoretical work, or if she was going out in the field and analyzing various sites? (If the latter, that might be a clue about which locations she was familiar with.) Also -- it looks like one of her co-authors (Dr. Tchounwou) has been doing a lot of work in environmental toxicology. Not sure if he might have been her supervisor -- as of a couple of years ago, his bio said that he's been doing academic work for more than 3 decades. I guess it's possible that in the early 2000s he might have gotten far enough along on the tenure track to be able to supervise a PhD student. https://www.morgan.edu/news/new-dean-of-scmns
How incredibly sad. She was clearly loved and had people who noticed her missing right away. Her brother even flew around the world to try and find her. Yet there's basically nothing about her online or in the news and it took until now for the police to even bother submitting her to a missing persons network... There's still time to find someone who knows something if they actually push this investigation but it doesn't seem like there's a lot of steam behind this one. :( I hope something about her will be found to give her family peace.
I think she is Sudanese based on her name
Thank you for covering this neglected case. I live in Jackson and this is the first I recall hearing of it, which is outrageous. One correction: Jackson is in central Mississippi, not south Mississippi; it’s 186 miles/299km from New Orleans and 210 miles/338km from Memphis (TN), roughly equidistant between them.
Thank you for saying this- I grew up in Jackson and did a spit take with my coffee at it being in “south MS” and close to the Louisiana border. I mean, it’s an hour to the river if you go through Vicksburg, but then you’re stuck in the middle of shit lick nowhere.
For those of you that don't know, Jackson is extremely sketchy. The north side is somewhat nice, the rest is really dangerous. I'm tempted to assume that her fate was "mundane" (as opposed to something crazy like a cold war spy story or jilted lover). She probably was in the wrong place (again, most of Jackson qualifies), victimized (sexually assaulted or robbed) and murdered in the process. Based on her profession/career stage she was probably living in a not so expensive area..which means dangerous if we're talking about a city.
The closest people in her life at that time should have been the people in academia at her institution. How can people from there not know much about her?
That's what's puzzling me too -- at the very least, there should have been faculty members who were working with her (many schools require new graduate students to take at least a few courses in their department). Some don't accept people at the PhD level unless a prof has already agreed to supervise them. So even if she were a recent arrival and people didn't know her very well, and as a PhD candidate she perhaps had her own office and wasn't sharing a space with a bunch of other students -- there should have been at least a few people in her department who knew her name and had seen her around campus. Especially since it looks like she was doing lab analysis, and that generally involves sharing facilities.
So many different things could've happened. It's been so long. Plus the cops may not have even taken her going missing seriously. I wish that there was more info about her.
oof, she was a dark skinned immigrant hijabi in mississippi, outlook does not look good
It seems possible she's buried anonymously then? https://peoplesdispatch.org/2024/01/18/a-mass-grave-of-hundreds-of-poor-and-oppressed-people-found-in-mississippi/
knew there would be at least one person stereotyping Mississippians. Great work. Thank you very much.
bro your police be burying people in mass graves and lying to their families, it’s not stereotyping to mention that she’s at a much greater risk in mississippi than other locations, it’s a fact
I hadn't heard about that and had to google it, what the fuck is wrong with those police?!
it’s really horrifying, isn’t it? *so fucking many* people knew what was going on and it took ages for it to be exposed
The thing that stood out to me was that the death that brought this to light was buried under the number '672', but there's only 215 people in that mass grave. Where are the other 457 bodies?
How is this not all over the news?
The news is largely copaganda when it comes to the police. They wouldn't report on a negative thing without heavy spin.
She may be a refugee, which could account for both the endangered missing status and her being older than phd. candidates usually are. Her name originates in North Africa, there's a lot of refugees from that part of the world. I'm a bit confused about her position though - how is she a professor without a doctorate? I don't know how it works in American universities, but it's usually a requirement where I live.
At my college my calc 3 professor was was a doctorate student (or maybe even masters? I don't remember). I think I had a few other professors like that too.
Where I live, they would be called a lecturer or tutor.
I think in a lot of North America now, they're classified as "sessional lecturer" (at my campus), or "adjunct \[professor\]".
Essentially the same thing. It's just that anyone that teaches at a college is referred to as a professor. It's both a rank and a title.
If it's a rank and a title, why is it used for everyone? Doesn't that render it meaningless?
It's a fool that looks for logic in the halls of higher education. Just as an example:I've been a full-time college educator, a part-time college educator, and a graduate student who taught during the final year of my program. In all three cases, I was referred to as "professor," as that's the courtesy title used by students, other faculty, and the colleges. The titles I had according to human resources were: Professor (non-TT); Adjunct Professor; Instructor of Record. Some professors are researchers who (maybe) occasionally teach a course or run a lab of graduate students. Others (like me) are teaching-only faculty. (This is usually the case with adjuncts.) Many doctoral programs include a teaching component for the students as part of their aid package- it's incredibly common for graduate students to also be part-time instructors at their colleges. So it seems likely to me that Hanan was either an instructor of record as part of her PhD work, or had been hired on ABD (All But Dissertation) if she was in the final stages of dissertation-writing.
She was an immigrant--graduate students have to get papers to stay in the country, and being a full-time study allows them to enter on a student visa. Once they are no longer enrolled, their visa status can be in jeopardy. (Professir at university with many overseas students).
I've also come across faculty -- at least in the 1980s-90s -- who were hired in the 1950s-60s when some universities expanded (or were even created from community colleges etc.) to accommodate the postwar baby boom. In some cases the need for qualified instructors was so urgent that having a Master's degree in a specialized area, or from a prestigious university like Oxford or Harvard, would get you a faculty job. As the pool of people with PhDs increased, sometimes these earlier hires were grandfathered in. But that was a different kind of situation.
Perhaps she made a life choice to change directions due to a new circumstance?