Lisa Blaydes is a Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. She is the author of State of Repression: Iraq under Saddam Hussein (Princeton University Press, 2018) and Elections and Distributive Politics in Mubarak’s Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2011). Professor Blaydes received the 2009 Gabriel Almond Award for best dissertation in the field of comparative politics from the American Political Science Association for this project.  Her articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, International Studies Quarterly, International Organization, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Middle East Journal, and World Politics. During the 2008-2009 and 2009-2010 academic years, Professor Blaydes was an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. She holds degrees in Political Science (PhD) from the University of California, Los Angeles, and International Relations (BA, MA) from Johns Hopkins University.

Alexandra Domike Blackman is an Assistant Professor in Cornell University’s Department of Government. In 2019-2020, she was a Post-Doctoral Associate at New York University - Abu Dhabi. Blackman’s work focuses on the development of religious identities in the political sphere, the challenges facing female politicians, and political party development in the Middle East. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Politics, Political Behavior, Politics & Religion, and Journal of Peace Research. Blackman was a Center for Arabic Study Abroad Fellow in Cairo, Egypt (2010-2011) and a Junior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC (2011-2012).

Salma Mousa is a scholar of social cohesion — typically using field experiments and partnerships with local governments and NGOs to explore the question of how to build it in the Middle East and beyond. Currently an Assistant Professor at UCLA's political science department, her research has been published in Science and covered by The Economist, BBC, Der Spiegel, the Times of London, and PBS NOVA. Mousa received her PhD from Stanford University's political science department in 2020 and was previously an Assistant Professor of political science at Yale University.

Christiana Parreira is an Assistant Professor in the Department of International Relations and Political Science at the Graduate Institute. Her research focuses on the role of local political institutions and actors in governance, looking primarily at post-conflict contexts in the Middle East and North Africa. Her forthcoming book project examines how local governments and elections facilitated predatory state-building practices in Lebanon. In other research, she examines determinants of governance quality and distributive outcomes in Lebanon, Iraq, and elsewhere in the Global South. She received her PhD from Stanford University in 2020. Before joining the Graduate Institute, she served as a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University and a pre-doctoral associate at the Harvard Kennedy School's Middle East Initiative.

David Siddhartha Patel is a residential visiting scholar at the Middle East Initiative at Harvard Kennedy School. His research focuses on religious authority, social order, identity, and state-building in the contemporary Middle East. His book Order Out of Chaos: Islam, Information, and the Rise and Fall of Social Orders in Iraq (Cornell University Press, 2022) examines the role of mosques and clerical networks in generating order after state collapse and is based upon independent field research he conducted in Basra. It won the Best Book Award from the APSA MENA Politics section and honorable mention for the Political Networks section’s Best Book Award. Patel is currently working on two book-length projects. The first, “Defunct States of the Middle East,” chronicles the more than two dozen territorial polities that disappeared from the map of the region after 1918: how they came to be, how they died, and how they are remembered today. The second, “The Market for Ayatollahs,” examines competition and collusion between Shi‘a religious authorities in Najaf in Iraq and Qom in Iran and how that relationship constrains varieties of Shi‘ism in the world today. Before joining MEI, he was a senior fellow and associate director for research at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University and, previously, an assistant professor of government at Cornell University. He holds a BA in economics and political science from Duke University and a PhD in political science from Stanford University.