Abbas Milani is a research fellow and codirector of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution. In addition, Milani is the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University. His expertise is US/Iran relations and Iranian cultural, political, and security issues.

Before coming to Hoover, Milani was a professor of history and political science and chair of the department at Notre Dame de Namur University and a research fellow at the Institute of International Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, in addition to being an assistant professor in the faculty of law and political science at Tehran University and a member of the board of directors of Tehran University's Center for International Studies from 1979 to 1987. Milani was a research fellow at the Iranian Center for Social Research from 1977 to 1978 and an assistant professor at the National University of Iran from 1975 to 1977.

Reuel Marc Gerecht is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies specializing in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Islamic militancy, and terrorism. His most recent publication is The Wave: Man, God, and the Ballot Box in the Middle East (Hoover Institution Press, 2011). Other books include A Spy's Journey into Revolutionary Iran and The Islamic Paradox. Gerecht was a case officer in the Central Intelligence Agency's Clandestine Service focusing on the Middle East. Previously, he was a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the director of the Middle East Initiative at the Project for New American Century. Gerecht is a graduate of Johns Hopkins, Edinburgh, and Princeton Universities.

John Hughes is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former editor of the Christian Science Monitor. He is currently a professor of international communications at Brigham Young University and writes a nationally syndicated column for the Monitor. Hughes served for six years as Africa correspondent and six years as Far East correspondent before becoming the Monitor's editor. A Nieman Fellow at Harvard, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Indonesia and the Overseas Press Club Award for his investigation of the international narcotics traffic. During the Reagan administration he was associate director of the United States Information Agency, director of the Voice of America, and assistant secretary of state for public affairs and department spokesman. He later chaired presidential and congressional commissions on international government broadcasting. He has written two books, on Africa and Indonesia.

Bernard Lewis is the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies Emeritus at Princeton University. A widely read expert on the Middle East, he is regarded as one of the West’s leading scholars on the region. He has published numerous books; the most recent is titled The End of Modern History in the Middle East (Hoover Institution Press, 2011).

Camille Pecastaing is a senior associate professor of Middle East studies at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. A student of behavioral sciences and historical sociology, his research focuses on the cognitive and emotive foundations of xenophobic political cultures and ethnoreligious violence, using the Muslim world and its European and Asian peripheries as a case study. He has written on political Islam, Islamist terrorism, social change, and globalization. Pecastaing’s latest publication is Jihad in the Arabian Sea.