Sina Azodi research interests include international security, nuclear nonproliferation, Iranian politics and U.S.-Iranian relations. He previously worked as a research assistant at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security and Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Dr. Azodi is a frequent commentator on both English- and Persian-speaking media, including BBC, Sky News, Al-Jazeera, TRT World, and i24. His analyses have appeared in Columbia University’s Journal of International Affairs, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Arms Control Association, Center for Strategic and International Studies, and Foreign Policy, and has been quoted by the New York Times, Washington Post, Spiegel, and Forbes. Dr. Azodi has published the chapter “The Fusion of Politics and Religion in Iran” in the edited book Political Islam in the Gulf Region. He is the author of forthcoming book "Iran and the Bomb: the United States, Iran and the Nuclear Question." He earned his BA and MA in international affairs from the Elliott School of International Affairs at the George Washington University, and PhD from University of South Florida.

Barbara Slavin is a distinguished fellow at the Stimson Center in Washington and a lecturer in international affairs at George Washington University. Prior to joining Stimson, she founded and directed the Future of Iran Initiative at the Atlantic Council and led a bi-partisan task force on Iran. The author of "Bitter Friends, Bosom Enemies: Iran, the US and the Twisted Path to Confrontation" (2007), she is a regular commentator on US foreign policy and Iran on NPR, PBS and C-Span. A career journalist, Slavin served as a columnist for Al-Monitor; assistant managing editor for world and national security at the Washington Times; senior diplomatic reporter for USA Today; Cairo and Beijing correspondent for The Economist and as an editor at the New York Times Week in Review. She covered such key foreign policy issues as the US-led ‘war on terrorism,’ policy toward ‘rogue’ states, the Iran-Iraq war and the Arab-Israeli conflict. She has traveled to Iran nine times. Slavin also served as a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, where she wrote Bitter Friends, and as a senior fellow at the US Institute of Peace, where she researched and wrote the report, Mullahs, Money and Militias: How Iran Exerts Its Influence in the Middle East.

Samer Shehata is the Colin Mackey and Patricia Molina de Mackey Associate Professor of Middle East Studies in the Department of International and Area Studies (IAS) at the University of Oklahoma. He has also been the Middle East Studies Program Coordinator and the Director of Graduate Studies in IAS. Dr. Shehata has previously taught at the American University in Cairo, Georgetown University, and the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. His areas of research include Middle Eastern politics, Egyptian politics, Islamist politics, U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East, elections, authoritarianism, and democratization.

Joelle Abi-Rached is Associate Professor of Medicine at the American University of Beirut, primarily affiliated with the Faculty of Medicine (Department of Internal Medicine) with a secondary affiliation at the Department of History and Archaeology. She is the Founding Director of the Program on Medical History, Ethics & Politics (MHEP). She is also Associate Faculty at the Department of History of Science at Harvard University. Her research focuses on the politics of life, health, and wealth. Her interests and perspective lie at the intersection of history, ethics, global health and policy. She has a particular interest in the history of psychiatry in its local and global iterations, the history of medicine more broadly speaking, and in the politics of health as it plays out in low- and middle-income countries or the so-called “Global South”.