Muhammad Zulfikar Rakhmat is a research professor at the Busan University of Foreign Studies. His research focuses on China-Middle East-Indonesia relations. He graduated from the Qatar University with a BA in international affairs and from the University of Manchester with a MA in international politics. He completed his Ph.D thesis on the Belt and Road Initiatives in the Gulf at Manchester.

His publications include a chapter entitled “Qatar and the ASEAN Community” in ASEAN Looks West: ASEAN and the Gulf Region (2017), books in Indonesian on China’s foreign policy in the Syrian conflict (2021) and Indonesia-GCC relations (2021), as well as monographs entitled, “Developments in Indonesian-Saudi Relations Under President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo” (KFCRIS, 2022) and “From Hormuz to Malacca: Straits of Cooperation between the GCC and Indonesia” (MEI-NUS, 2022). His opinions have also been published in The Diplomat, Asia Sentinel, and The Conversation.

Dr Koh Choon Hwee is a historian of the Ottoman empire. She is currently a visiting assistant professor at the National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, and she will take on an assistant professor position at UCLA’s History department in July 2021.

Choon Hwee has a PhD in history from Yale University, an MA in history from the American University of Beirut and she graduated from NUS with a BA in philosophy and South Asian studies.

Mattia is the head of Asia–Pacific at Tradeteq, an electronic trading platform.

He was previously with Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund (Qatari Diar), where he managed a portfolio of equities and worked on large private equity and real estate transactions worldwide. Prior to that, he was part of the Goldman Sachs Group, where he was involved in the investment and portfolio management of European real estate acquisitions. He began his career with the private wealth management team of Merrill Lynch.

Mattia sits on the advisory council of SovereigNet, The Fletcher Network for Sovereign Wealth and Global Capital at The Fletcher School (Tufts University).

He graduated from The Fletcher School at Tufts University (Boston) with an MA in international affairs and from Bocconi University (Milan)/ Science Po (Paris) with a BS in business administration.

Dr Francesca Albanese is a human rights lawyer (LLM, SOAS) who spent 12 years working in the field of human rights, including with the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and more recently with the UN Agency for Relief and Work of Palestine Refugees in the Near East. Her legal expertise includes research, policy advice and capacity building on various human rights issues mainly in Asia and the Middle East and North Africa region. This includes the protection of refugees and irregular migrants, the international human rights system, transitional justice and the establishment of national human rights institutions and mechanisms for the prevention of torture.

Francesca was leading the research for the revisited edition of Dr Lex Takkenberg’s seminal work on The Status of Palestinian Refugees in International Law, first published by Oxford University Press in 1998. The book, Palestinians Refugees in International Law (Second Edition), was published in 2020.

She is also an associate researcher at the Institute for the Study of International Migration, (ISIM) Georgetown University and an affiliated scholar to the Refugee Program of the Issam Fares Institute, American University of Beirut.

Dr Serkan Yolaçan is an assistant professor of anthropology at Stanford University. In his research, Serkan combines broad space and deep history empirically, and history and anthropology methodologically, to generate geo-historical frames that speak to questions of human mobility, international order, and state expansionism, past and present. His book project, Time Travelers of Baku: Conversion and Revolution in West Asia, weaves the modern experiences of Turkey, Iran, and Russia through the lens of a mobile, diasporic people from the region of Azerbaijan.

He has an active media profile in Southeast Asia through regular contributions to Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post and Singapore-based Channel NewsAsia. He holds a PhD in cultural anthropology from Duke University and an MA in sociology and social anthropology from the Central European University.

Dr Zoltan Pall is an anthropologist specialising in transnational Islamic movements in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. His main research topics include the structure and function of transnational Muslim networks, the political dynamics of Islamic movements and religious authority. While in MEI, his research focused on Salafism and Muslim transnational charities in the Arabian Gulf and Southeast Asia.

Before obtaining his PhD from Utrecht University, Zoltan was a visiting research fellow at the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) in Leiden and a research fellow at Utrecht University. He has published books, articles and policy papers on Salafism in Kuwait, Lebanon and Southeast Asia, and is the author of Salafism in Lebanon: Local and Transnational Movements (Cambridge University Press, 2018).