Sara Bazoobandi is a non-resident research fellow at the Institute for Security Policy of Kiel University in Germany. She was previously a Marie Curie fellow at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies working on Iran’s economic diversification and economic resilience strategies. Additionally, she is a non-resident fellow at Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, and ISPI in Milan. Over the past decade, she has worked as a consultant for various global clients in both public and private sector. Between 2013 and 2018, she was a senior lecturer in international political economy at Regent’s University London. Prior to that, she was a scholar at the Middle East Institute of the National University of Singapore.
She was an associate fellow at the MENA program of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House, from 2013-16, and was appointed a member of the Global Agenda Council of the World Economic Forum on the Middle East and North Africa for 2014-2016. Sara has been a fellow at Higher Education Academy in the United Kingdom since 2015.
She holds a PhD in Arab and Islamic studies from Exeter University, an MSc in economic development in emerging markets from the University of Reading, and speaks Persian, English, German, and Arabic. Her current research interests are political economy, security and foreign policy of MENA, Iran, Information Wars, critical discourse analysis, and China-MENA relations.