Vali Nasr

He taught at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University, University of San Diego and the Naval Postgraduate School and was a Senior Fellow at the Belfer Center at Harvard University, as well as Stanford University and University of California, San Diego prior to being appointed dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in March 2012.

Nasr is a member of the State Department's Foreign Affairs Policy Board and served as senior advisor to the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, between 2009 and 2011. He is a Life Member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

He appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on 1 August 2006, 22 September 2009, and 25 April 2013. Due to the accuracy of his political predictions Nasr has been hailed as a "shrewd forecaster."

Vali Reza Nasr (Persian: ولی‌ رضا نصر ‎, born 20 December 1960) is an Iranian-American academic and author specializing in the Middle East and the Islamic world. He served as Dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, D.C. from 2012 to 2019. Nasr is also a Senior Fellow in foreign policy at Brookings Institution and is described by The Economist as "a leading world authority on Shia Islam".

Son of Iranian philosopher Hossein Nasr, Vali Nasr was born in Tehran in 1960, went to school in England at age 16, and immigrated to the U.S. after the 1979 Revolution. He received his BA from Tufts University in International Relations summa cum laude. He earned his Master's degree in International Economics and Middle East Studies from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in 1984, then went on to earn his PhD in Political Science from MIT in 1991.