Karim Sadjadpour
Karim Sadjadpour is an associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He joined Carnegie after four years as the chief Iran analyst at the International Crisis Group based in Tehran and Washington, D.C. A leading researcher on Iran, Sadjadpour has conducted dozens of interviews with senior Iranian officials, and hundreds with Iranian intellectuals, clerics, dissidents, paramilitaries, businessmen, students, activists, and youth, among others.
He is a regular contributor to BBC World TV and radio, CNN, National Public Radio, and PBS NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and has written for the Economist, Washington Post, New York Times, International Herald Tribune, and New Republic.
Frequently called upon to brief U.S. and EU officials about Middle Eastern affairs, he has testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, given lectures at Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford Universities, and has been the recipient of numerous academic awards, including a Fulbright scholarship.
Sadjadpour was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in Davos, and is a board member of the Banu Foundation, an organization dedicated to assisting grass-roots organizations that are empowering women worldwide. He has lived in Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East.
http://www.carnegieendowment.org/experts/index.cfm?fa=e...Hooman Majd - from his biography, he is an interesting and not obvious choice.
Hooman Majd is a writer based in New York. He has written for GQ, the New York Times, The New Yorker, the New York Observer, Salon and is a contributing editor at Interview.
He often writes on Iranian affairs, and travels regularly to Iran. He has also served as an advisor and translator for two Iranian presidents, Mohammad Khatami and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on their trips to the United States and the United Nations, and has written about those experiences.
Hooman Majd has also had a long career as an executive in the music and film businesses. He was Executive VP of Island Records, where he worked with a diverse group of artists including U2, The Cranberries, Tricky and Melissa Etheridge; and Head of Film and Music at Palm Pictures, where he executive-produced James Toback’s “Black and White” and Khyentse Norbu’s “The Cup” (Cannes 1999).
Majd has had his short fiction published by Serpent’s Tail (London) and Bald Ego (New York). His non-fiction book on Iran, "The Ayatollah Begs To Differ", was published by Doubleday in the Fall of 2008.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hooman-majdMichael Singh, was in the Bush administartion working for Powell and Rice
Michael Singh is the Ira Weiner fellow at The Washington Institute and former senior director for Middle East affairs on the National Security Council (NSC).
At the White House, Mr. Singh was responsible for devising and implementing strategies on a wide range of Middle East issues, from the Arab-Israeli peace process, to supporting Lebanon's Cedar Revolution, to the efforts to prevent Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons capability. He served in the NSC for three years, as senior director for Middle East affairs and as director for Iran and for Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and North Africa. Previously, Mr. Singh served as special assistant to secretaries of state Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell and was staff assistant to then ambassador Daniel Kurtzer at the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv. After nearly eight years in the foreign service, Mr. Singh left government in August 2008.
As the Ira Weiner fellow, Mr. Singh contributes to The Washington Institute's research and editorial review process, offering advice and counsel to the organization's professional research staff and participating in the public debate over the direction and content of U.S. Middle East policy. He is a regular contributor to ForeignPolicy.com's feature blog "Shadow Government".
Here in an interesting piece he wrote before the election on possible results of the election -
http://shadow.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/06/11/will_i...Mehdi Khalaji
Mehdi Khalaji is a senior fellow at The Washington Institute, focusing on Iranian politics as well as the politics of Shiite groups in the Middle East. A Shiite theologian by training, Mr. Khalaji has also served on the editorial boards of two prominent Iranian periodicals and produced for the BBC as well as the U.S. government's Persian news service.
From 1986 to 2000, Mr. Khalaji trained in the seminaries of Qom, the traditional center of Iran's clerical establishment. There he studied theology and jurisprudence, earning a doctorate and researching widely on modern intellectual and philosophical-political developments in Iran and the wider Islamic and Western worlds. In Qom, and later in Tehran, Mr. Khalaji launched a career in journalism, first serving on the editorial board of a theological journal, Naqd va Nazar, and then the daily Entekhab. In addition to his own writing, he has translated the works of the humanist Islamic scholar Muhammad Arkoun.
In 2000, Mr. Khalaji moved Paris where he studied Shiite theology and exegesis in the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. He also worked for BBC Persian as a political analyst on Iranian affairs, eventually becoming a broadcaster for the Prague-based Radio Farda, the Persian-language service of the U.S. government's Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. At Radio Farda, he produced news, features, and analysis on a range of Middle Eastern, Iranian, and Islamic issues.
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