Lina Attalah , Journalist and Blogger , Egypt 

Lina Attalah is the co-founder and chief editor of Mada Masr, a Cairo-based young media project and website. Lina studied journalism at the American University in Cairo. She wrote for Reuters, Cairo Times, the Daily Star, and the Christian Science Monitor, Al Masry Al Youm English Edition among others. She also worked as project manager for a number of research-based projects with multi-media outputs around the themes of space, mobility, and intellectual history. Lina is particularly drawn to border areas, where human geography issues of conflict and desire are rampant. She covered Egypt extensively, beside occasional coverage from Syria, Lebanon, Sudan, Gaza and Iran.

 Elena Sánchez-Montijano, Co-ordinator, Sahwa project, Spain

Elena Sánchez-Montijano is Senior Research Fellow and Coordinator of the Migration Programme at CIDOB. She holds a PhD in Political and Social Sciences from Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain). She is guest lecturer at the Inter-university Master's Degree in Contemporary Migrations at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and the Universitat de Barcelona since 2013. She is the scientific coordinator and the WP’s leader of Migration at the SAHWA FP7 research project. She is also co-director of the “Integration Policies: Who benefits? – MIPEX 2015” project. She has been a visiting researcher at the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS), Oxford University and the Center for Ethnic and Migration Studies (CEDEM), Université de Liège.

Issandr El Amrani, North Africa Director, International Crisis Group 

Issandr El Amrani is the North Africa Project Director for the International Crisis Group, overseeing the conflict prevention and resolution NGO's work from Morocco to Egypt. Prior to joining Crisis Group, he was a writer and consultant on Middle Eastern affairs based in Cairo. His reporting and commentary on the region has appeared in The Economist, London Review of Books, Financial Times, The National, The Guardian, Time and other publications. He formerly was the editor of the Cairo Times, a co-founder of Cairo magazine, and publishes one of the longest-running and most-read blogs on Arab politics culture, www.arabist.net. He currently lives in Rabat.

Hassan Hakimian, School of Oriental and African Studies, UK

Hassan Hakimian is the Director of the London Middle East Institute and MBI Al Jaber Reader in Economics with reference to the Middle East. Previously, he was an Associate Dean at Cass Business School, City University, where he led international business education programmes in China (Shanghai) and the Middle East (Dubai). During a ten-year period between 1993 and 2002, Hassan was at the SOAS Department of Economics where he directed an award-winning postgraduate international distance learning programme, and taught various courses including Applied Economic Development of the Middle East. 

Linda Herrera, University of Illinois, US

Linda Herrera is a social anthropologist with regional specialization in the Middle East and North Africa. She works in the fields of comparative/international education, international development studies, and youth studies. She received her B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley in Middle East Studies, MA from the American University in Cairo in Anthropology and Sociology, and PhD from Teachers College, Columbia University in Comparative and International Education. Her research interests lay at the intersection of education and social transformation in the Middle East and North Africa, critical ethnography and critical pedagogy, and youth citizenship and politics in a digital era. More recently she has been turning her attention to youth politics and revolution in the Middle East.

Oliver Schlumberger, University of Tübingen, Germany

Oliver Schlumberger is the Director of the Institute of Political Science and professor for Middle Eastern policy at the University of Tübingen.

 He studied poetical science and Islamic Studies in Tübingen, Geneva and Damascus. He completed several research stays in the Middle East (in Egypt, Yemen and Jordan).  His teaching and research focus is on democratization and political reforms in the Middle East.

Iván Martín, Spain

Iván Martín is an economist. He is Part-Time Professor at the Migration Policy Centre of the European University Institute and member of the Group of Experts on Youth Participation in Local Dialogue of the Anna Lindh Foundation for the Dialogue between Cultures. Formerly, he has been Director of the Socio-Economic Forum of Casa Árabe (Arab House) and its International Institute for Arab and Muslim World Studies in Spain (2006-2008), Research Administrator at the College of Europe, Natolin Campus (Poland) on European Neighbourhood Strategies
(2010-2011), Associate Professor at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (2002-2006), as well as Associate Research Fellow at the Instituto Complutense de Estudios Internacionales in Madrid (2008-2013).