Vali Nasr is dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University and a senior fellow in foreign policy at The Brookings Institution. Previously, Nasr was an adjunct senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council of Foreign Relations as well as a professor of Middle East and South Asia Politics at the Naval Postgraduate School.

Nasr is a specialist on political Islam and has worked extensively on developments in the Muslim world with a focus on the links between religion, politics, violence, and democratization. Nasr is the author of five books, including The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future (Norton, 2006); Democracy in Iran (Oxford, 2006); and The Islamic Leviathan: Islam and the Making of State Power (Oxford, 2001). He has edited The Oxford Dictionary of Islam (Oxford, 2003), and co-edited Expectation of the Millennium: Shiism in History (SUNY Press, 1989). His works have been translated into Arabic, French, Spanish, Indonesian, Turkish, Persian, Chinese, and Urdu.

Nasr has written for the New York Times and Washington Post, and has provided expert commentary to CNN, BBC, CBS, NBC, National Public Radio and The Newshour with Jim Lehrer. Nasr has also been the recipient of grants from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and American Institute of Pakistan Studies. Nasr received his BA and MA in International Relations from Tufts University in 1984, and his PhD in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute for Technology in 1991. He is a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations.