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  1. About GAPP
  2. Panelist Biographies

Nabil Fahmy

Founding Dean of the School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, The American University in Cairo (AUC)

Nabil Fahmy is a career diplomat (1976-2011) and the former foreign minister of Egypt (July 2013 - June 2014) during which he steered the course of Egypt’s diplomacy during a time of immense challenge. While foreign minister, he formulated a strategy to reorient Egypt’s foreign policy, ensuring that Egypt had numerous foreign policy options both regionally and globally.

During his distinguished diplomatic career over three decades, Fahmy served as ambassador to the United States (1999-2008) and Japan (1997-1999) as well as in numerous government and international positions. His work focused on international and regional security, disarmament and non-proliferation, conflict resolution and Arab-Israeli diplomacy. He was also the chairman of the United Nations advisory board on disarmament matters, and the vice-chairman of the United Nations general assembly’s first committee dealing with disarmament and international security. He was also a member of the Egyptian delegation to the 1991 Madrid peace conference; the review conferences of the treaty on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons; the committee on principles in the United Nations conference on promoting international cooperation in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy and many other multilateral events; supreme advisory council of the Beijing forum. Fahmy was bestowed with the cordon of the order of the rising sun by Japanese emperor Naruhito.

Fahmy also founded the School of Global Affairs and Public Policy (GAPP) at The American University in Cairo (AUC) in 2009. Its programs are internationally and domestically accredited. And the school has become an invaluable Middle East voice of stellar caliber on topical issues of public affairs, law, journalism, as well as studies on the Middle East, refugees, and gender and American studies. He has served as its founding dean from 2009-2014. Nabil Fahmy has published his newest English book "Egypt's diplomacy in war, peace, and transition" in February 2020, which seeks to inform future generations about the challenges of statecraft he and his compatriots faced over the past fifty years.

He has also published an updated Arabic book in January 2022 entitled " From the Heart of Events". He also publishes weekly articles on global and international affairs, regional Middle East politics and governance.

Amr Adly

Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, The American University in Cairo (AUC)

Amr Adly is an assistant professor in the department of political science at The American University in Cairo (AUC). Worked as a researcher at the Middle East directions program at the European University Institute. He worked as a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Middle East Center, where his research centered on political economy, development studies, and economic sociology of the Middle East, with a focus on Egypt. Adly has taught political economy at AUC and Stanford University. He has also worked as a project manager at the center of democracy, development, and the rule of law at Stanford University, where he was a postdoctoral fellow. Adly is the author of cleft capitalism: the social origins of failed market-making in Egypt (Stanford University Press, 2020) and state reform and development in the Middle East: the cases of Turkey and Egypt (Routledge, 2012). He has been published in several peer-reviewed journals, including Geoforum, Business and Politics, the journal of Turkish Studies, and Middle Eastern Studies. Adly is also a frequent contributor to print and online news sources, including Bloomberg, Jadaliyya, and Al-Shorouk.

Ramzy Ezzeldin Ramzy

Former Ambassador of Egypt and Former Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations and Deputy Envoy for Syria

Ramzy Ezzeldin Ramzy’s diplomatic career spans over 41 years serving in the Egyptian diplomatic service, the United Nations, and the League of Arab States. His most recent position was United Nations Assistant Secretary-General and Deputy Special Envoy for Syria (2014-2019). Ramzy served at the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for 38 years during which he was ambassador to Germany, Brazil, Austria, Guyana, Surinam, and Slovakia.  Was also the Egyptian Permanent Representative to UN and other international organizations in Vienna as well as the Egyptian Governor on the Governing Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Ramzy served as DCM at the Egyptian embassy in Washington D.C., Political Counselor in Moscow, and at the Permanent Mission to the UN in New York. He held various positions at the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs among which were Senior Undersecretary, Assistant Minister for International Economic Affairs, Deputy Assistant Minister for International Security and Disarmament Affairs and Director of United Nations Affairs. Ramzy served as the Permanent Observer of the League of Arab States to the UN and other international organizations in Vienna. Ramzy was educated at the American University in Cairo and Surrey University in the U.K.

Lisa Anderson

Special Lecturer and James T. Shotwell Professor of International Relations Emerita at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs

Lisa Anderson currently serves as the Principal Investigator for an international project housed at Columbia to develop guidelines for the conduct of responsible, ethical and constructive social inquiry in the Middle East and North Africa.

Anderson served as President of the American University in Cairo for five years, from 2011-2016. Prior to her appointment as President, she was the University’s provost, a position she had assumed in 2008. She is Dean Emerita of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia, where she led the school from 1997-2007. She was on the faculty of Columbia since 1986; prior to her appointment as Dean, she served as Chair of the Political Science Department and Director of Columbia's Middle East Institute and also taught at Princeton and Harvard Universities.

Anderson’s scholarly research has included work on state formation in the Middle East and North Africa; on regime change and democratization in developing countries; and on social science, academic research and public policy both in the United States and around the world. Among her books are The State and Social Transformation in Tunisia and Libya, 1830-1980 (1986) and Pursuing Truth, Exercising Power: Social Science and Public Policy in the Twenty-first Century (2003); she has also published numerous scholarly articles.

Anderson is a trustee of the Aga Khan University, Tufts University and the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. A member emerita of the Board of Directors of Human Rights Watch, served as elected President of the Middle East Studies Association, and as Chair of the Board of the Social Science Research Council. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Council on Foreign Relations, she has received honorary degrees from Monmouth University and the American University in Paris.

Ahmed Galal

Egyptian Economist and Politician

Ahmed Galal is the Chairman of the board of the MENA Health Policy Forum. Until December 2016, and was the managing director of the Economic Research Forum, for ten years. Galal was Egypt’s Finance Minister between July 2013 and March 2014. Previously, worked for the World Bank for 18 years where he conducted research and provided policy advice to governments in several countries around the world. While on leave from the Bank (2000-2006), he was the Executive Director and Director of Research of the Egyptian Center for Economic Studies (ECES). Galal authored or co-authored more than dozen books, including “Welfare Consequences of Selling Public Enterprises”, “The Road Not Traveled: Education Reform in the Middle East and North Africa” In 2004, was awarded the prestigious regional prize for Economic and Social Sciences by the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences. He also holds a PhD in economics, received from Boston University in 1986.

Tarek Masoud

Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Governance John F. Kennedy School of Government Harvard University

Tarek Masoud is the Ford Foundation Professor of Democracy and Governance at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. He is the co-Editor of the Journal of Democracy of the National Endowment for Democracy and serves as the Faculty Director of the Kennedy School's Middle East Initiative and the Initiative on Democracy in Hard Places. His research focuses on political development in Arabic-speaking and Muslim-majority countries. He is the author of Counting Islam: Religion, Class, and Elections in Egypt (Cambridge University Press, 2014), of The Arab Spring: Pathways of Repression and Reform with Jason Brownlee and Andrew Reynolds (Oxford University Press, 2015), as well as of several articles and book chapters. As a 2009 Carnegie Scholar, a trustee of the American University in Cairo, and the recipient of grants from the National Science Foundation and the Paul and Daisy Soros Foundation, among others. Masoud holds an AB from Brown and a Ph.D from Yale, both in political science.