Sara Bazoobandi is a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and an associate at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies. Prior to this, she was a senior lecturer in international political economy at Regent’s University London and a visiting scholar at the Middle East Institute of the National University of Singapore. Bazoobandi has contributed to various global research projects on political, economic, and social affairs of the Middle East and North Africa. She was an associate fellow at the MENA program of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House and served as a member of the Global Agenda Council of the World Economic Forum on the Middle East and North Africa. 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, Arabic and German.

Her work and commentary on global affairs has been widely published in Farsi and English media. She is the editor/author of The New Regional Order in the Middle East: Changes and Challenges (Palgrave Macmillan); Political Economy of the Gulf Sovereign Wealth Funds: A Case Study of Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (Routledge, 2012) The Politics of Food Security: Asian and Middle Eastern Strategies (Gerlach Press, 2013).