Ali Vaez Crisis Group Deputy Program Director for the Middle East and North Africa

Ali Vaez regularly advises U.S., European, and Middle Eastern officials and was intimately involved in the 2015 nuclear negotiations in his former capacity as Crisis Group’s Iran Project Director. Previously, he served as a Senior Political Affairs Officer at the United Nations Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs and was the Iran Project Director at the Federation of American Scientists. He is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and a Fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He is a co-author of How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare. Trained as a scientist, Vaez has more than a decade of experience in journalism. He has written widely on Iranian affairs and is a regular contributor to mainstream media outlets, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, and Foreign Affairs. He is a frequent guest on CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, and NPR. Vaez was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University from 2008 to 2010 and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Geneva and a master’s degree from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.