Leadership

Ossama Hassanein

Honorary Chairman

Dr. Ossama Hassanein is an entrepreneur, mentor, and venture capitalist. Over the last 37 years, he has managed $1 billion of international technology funds in diverse leadership roles, including Executive Vice-President of Berkeley International in San Francisco, Chairman of Technocom Ventures in Paris, President of Newbridge Networks Holding in Ottawa, and Chairman of the Rising Tide Fund in Silicon Valley. He was chairman or co-founder of seven leading-edge digital communication startups in the US, UK, Switzerland, and France. The combined market value of investments today exceeds $200 billion.

He currently serves on the boards of Bank of the West in San Francisco, Quanergy Systems in Silicon Valley, and the MBR Innovation Fund in Dubai. He is a charter member of the C-100 and former chairman of TechWadi, both Silicon-Valley-based associations dedicated to mentoring and financing Canadian and MENA entrepreneurs.

Dr. Hassanein is President Cabinet member of the University of British Columbia. He also serves on the Board of Advisors of the School of Applied Science and the Personalized Medicine Initiative. He is the Willard Brown Distinguished Visiting Professor at the American University in Cairo School of Business. He lectured at Stanford University, the University of San Diego, the University of Santa Clara, and U.C. Berkeley.

Robert Price

Chairman of the Advisory Council

Robert Price is a Professor of Political Science and Associate Vice Chancellor for Research Emeritus at UC Berkeley. His research and teaching fields include comparative politics and African affairs, with a special emphasis on South Africa. He is the author of Society and Bureaucracy in Contemporary Ghana (1975), U.S. Foreign Policy toward Sub-Saharan Africa: National Interest and Global Strategy (1979), The Apartheid Regime: Political Power and Racial Domination (co-editor, 1980), and The Apartheid State in Crisis (1991), as well as a variety of journal articles and book chapters dealing with the new African state, U.S. foreign policy towards Africa, and political change in South Africa.

Dariush Zahedi

Founding Director

Since 2001, Dariush Zahedi has taught a diverse array of courses for the Departments of Political Science, Political Economy, and Peace and Conflict Studies as well as the Law School at UC Berkeley. Zahedi has also taught for the College of Letters and Science’s Discovery Courses Program. Teaching in the program is by invitation only, with invitations issued solely to instructors whose teaching record is stellar. He has published three books on the political economy of the Middle East. His articles have appeared in such publications as the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, Christian Science Monitor, Los Angeles Times, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Harvard Middle Eastern and Islamic Review, and Middle East Policy, among others. He is the co-editor of four book series for Palgrave Macmillan, including Institution Building in West Asia and North Africa, the Political Economy of Islam, Natural Resources Management in West Asia and North Africa, and Financial Institutions, Reforms, and Policies in West Asia and North Africa. He is also the co-editor of three book series on Entrepreneurship, Economic Growth, and Development in the Middle East at Peter Lang Publishing. His knowledge of political economy and business milieu of the Middle East and North Africa, however, is not purely academic. He has worked for a Middle Eastern investment bank and Iran’s largest private mining corporation. In his capacity as an analyst for the investment bank, he traveled widely throughout the region. He became intimately familiar with various sectors of the region’s economies and impediments to inclusive growth. Zahedi has also worked as an academic in Turkey.