Contemporary Iran: Realities and Prospects for the Future

Roya Hakakian is an Iranian-American writer, journalist, and public speaker. Her opinion columns, essays, and book reviews appear in leading English language publications including The New York Times, The New York Review of Books and The Atlantic. A founding member of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, she has spoken on a variety of news outlets, from CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS to MSNBC, as well as in Washington D.C. for the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee and the State Department with U.S. Secretary Antony Blinken. Her latest book A Beginner’s Guide to America: For the Immigrant and the Curious has been called a contemporary Tocquevlllian account by The Wall Street Journal and The Boston Globe. She is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship among many other prizes and has been called one of “the most important activists, academics and journalists of her generation.”

Roya Hakakian is an Iranian-American writer, journalist, and public speaker. Her opinion columns, essays, and book reviews appear in leading English language publications including The New York Times, The New York Review of Books and The Atlantic. A founding member of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, she has spoken on a variety of news outlets, from CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS to MSNBC, as well as in Washington D.C. for the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee and the State Department with U.S. Secretary Antony Blinken. Her latest book A Beginner’s Guide to America: For the Immigrant and the Curious has been called a contemporary Tocquevlllian account by The Wall Street Journal and The Boston Globe. She is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship among many other prizes and has been called one of “the most important activists, academics and journalists of her generation.”

Dr. Kaveh Madani is an environmental scientist, educator, and activist known for his work on complex human-natural systems at the interface of science, policy, and society. He is currently the Director of the United Nations University Institute of Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH), known as the UN Think Tank on Water, where he leads scientific research and policy solutions to address the growing global water and environmental crises.

Dr. Madani is a former Deputy Vice President of Iran who served as the Deputy Head of Iran’s Department of Environment. He has also served as the Vice President of the UN Environment Assembly Bureau and Chief of Iran’s Department of Environment’s International Affairs and Conventions Center. He held different strategic roles during his public service and led Iran’s delegation in different major intergovernmental meetings and negotiations.

As a prolific scholar, Madani has worked extensively on complex issues in water management, environmental and energy policy, food security, climate change impacts and adaptation, sustainable development, and transboundary-conflicts and negotiations in North America, Europe, Africa, Asia and Middle East. He has received several prestigious awards and recognitions for his fundamental research contributions, teaching innovations, as well as outreach and humanitarian activities. Among these are the 2012 recognition by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) as one of the ten New Faces of Civil Engineering, Arne Richter Award for Outstanding Young Scientists by the European Geosciences Union (EGU) in 2016, and the ASCE’s Walter Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize in 2017.

He holds a Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the University of California, Davis, Master of Water Resources from the Lund University and B.Sc. in Civil Engineering from the University of Tabriz, and has done his post-doctoral research in Environmental Economics and Policy at the Water Science and Policy Center at the University of California, Riverside.