Damoun Nassehi

Damoun Nassehi's place in Brazilian jiu-jitsu was built around a modest training schedule in Egersund, Norway. BJJ Heroes' account of Espen Mathiesen's early years says Mathiesen began training at fifteen under Nassehi, who was then a blue belt. It also describes Nassehi as a doctor whose workload limited the group to three sessions a week. Those sessions nevertheless gave Mathiesen his first instruction in the sport and placed Nassehi at the start of his development in jiu-jitsu. The same account traces Nassehi's jiu-jitsu background to Denmark. Before relocating to Norway, it says, he trained with Shimon Mochizuki at Checkmat/Arte Suave. That connection is documented through a profile centered on Mathiesen rather than through Nassehi's own testimony, but the medical record independently places Nassehi in Copenhagen during the period. A 2011 APMIS study of VEGF-A and brain edema in intracranial meningiomas lists him as its first author and affiliates him with the Department of Neurosurgery at Copenhagen University Hospital. A Stavanger Open registration list offers a contemporary snapshot of the Egersund group in 2011. Nassehi was entered for Egersund BJJ in the male white-and-blue under-85-kilogram division and listed as a blue belt in the separate belt column. Mathiesen appeared under the same club in the male white-and-blue juvenile open class and was listed as a white belt. The list records registrations rather than results, but it puts teacher, student and academy together at a specific event. The local group soon developed a relationship beyond Egersund. BJJ Heroes dates a seminar by José Carlos at Nassehi's academy to 2011 and says the team subsequently affiliated with Carlos's Kimura-Nova União organization. Municipal case documents dated January 2013 include a 2012 report showing that the connection had become publicly visible. The report listed Kimura Egersund, represented by trainer Damoun Nassehi, as the organizer of a public Brazilian jiu-jitsu session featuring Carlos. It described Carlos as a black belt and head coach from Kimura Norway. These records describe the early training group and its coaching relationships; they do not establish a single legal organization stretching unchanged back to its first sessions. A later entry in Norway's official entity register lists Egersund Brasiliansk Jiu Jitsu Klubb as a sports club at an address care of Nassehi. More recently, Clinch's directory of Norwegian jiu-jitsu clubs has listed him among four head instructors at Kimura Egersund, alongside Carlos, Julia Yhamel and Pepi Harlem. The directory is a commercial listing rather than a federation record, but it shows that Nassehi remains publicly associated with the club's teaching team. Throughout those academy years, medicine continued as a separate professional track. The 2011 Copenhagen paper studied VEGF-A and brain edema in intracranial meningiomas. In 2013, another APMIS study in the same broad research area examined the VEGF-A pathway and peritumoral brain edema in angiomatous meningiomas; Nassehi was again listed as first author. Those dates overlap with the period in which the Egersund group appeared in competition registrations and municipal records. They give a documented counterpart to the three-session schedule described in Mathiesen's biography: the instructor was also working in medicine and contributing to academic research. That professional work later continued in Norway. The Journal of the Norwegian Medical Association identifies Nassehi as a general practitioner and an associate professor at the University of Bergen. Sokndal municipality separately lists him among its general practitioners, and a 2025 article from the Norwegian Medical Association gives the same combination of clinical and university roles. The surviving record does not provide a reliable current belt rank or a documented promotion history for Nassehi. What it does preserve is the development of a local teaching role: training in Denmark, a limited schedule in Egersund, Mathiesen's first lessons, the connection with José Carlos, and Clinch's later directory listing Nassehi among Kimura Egersund's instructors. Alongside that thread runs a second career in clinical medicine and research.