Jamal Abdi is the President of the National Iranian American Council, and Founder & Executive Director of NIAC Action. Previously, he worked as a Policy Advisor in the US Congress and has been featured in the NYT, Foreign Policy, CNN, BBC and more. Jamal has over 15 years of political expertise monitoring US-Iran relations, foreign policy, national security and immigration issues. 

Ryan Costello is the Policy Director at NIAC & NIAC Action and works with policymakers, monitors legislation, conducts research and writing, and coordinates advocacy efforts. His work has been published in The National Interest, Defense One, The Huffington Post, The Hill and more. Ryan has over 10 years of expertise in nuclear nonproliferation, US-Iran relations, foreign policy, and engaging with policymakers in the administration and on Capitol Hill. 

John Limbert is NIAC Community Council Member & Former U.S. Ambassador. In 2018 he ended twelve years as Class of 1955 Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the U.S. Naval Academy. During a 34-year diplomatic career, he served mostly in the Middle East and Islamic Africa. Beginning in 1964, he worked in Iran as a university and high school teacher, and later was among the last American diplomats to serve in Iran, where he was held hostage in 1979-81. He has authored numerous books and articles on Middle Eastern subjects, including the espionage novel 

Maryam Jamshidi is NIAC Community Council Member & Associate Professor of Law at the University of Colorado Law School where she teaches and writes in the areas of national security law, public international law, the law of foreign relations, and tort law. 

Kevan Harris is NIAC Community Council Member & Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California-Los Angeles. Harris is the lead researcher for the Iran Social Survey, a multi-wave nationally representative survey of economic and social relations in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Farideh Farhi is NIAC Community Council Member & an Independent Scholar based in Hawai’i. Her publications include States and Urban-Based Revolutions in Iran and Nicaragua, as well as numerous articles and book chapters on comparative analysis of revolutions and Iranian politics.

Juan Cole is NIAC Community Council Member & Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. For three and a half decades, he has sought to put the relationship between the West and the Muslim world in historical context. He has written about the upheavals in the Arab World since 2011, including about Sunni extremist groups and Shiite politics. Cole commands Arabic, Persian, and Urdu and reads Turkish, and knows both Middle Eastern and South Asian Islam.