Maha Aziz Keynote Speaker

Professor in the MA International Relations Program at New York University's Graduate School of Arts & Sciences
Risk expert, Global Future Council, World Economic Forum, for Frontier Risks (2020-2022)
Best-selling author of five-time award-winning book, 'Future World Order' (2019/2020) on global risk and of upcoming 'A Global Spring' (2021)

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Maha Aziz's Biography

Dr Maha Hosain Aziz, a former investment banker and Businessweek columnist, has been a professor, author and cartoonist in the MA International Relations Program at New York University’s Graduate School of Arts & Sciences since 2012, specialising in global risk and prediction. She is also a risk expert in the 2020-2022 Global Future Council at the World Economic Forum.

She has given speeches on global risk and future trends to varied audiences at venues worldwide, including the United Nations, Commonwealth Secretariat, European Parliament, Bosphorus Forum, Cyfy Africa, Asia Society, Convoco Forum, Betaworks Studios and American Apparel & Footwear Association. Her recent virtual and in-person speaking engagements have focused on explaining the Covid-19 effect on geopolitics, politics, economy and society – and what may emerge in a post-pandemic world.

She is an author of the five-time award-winning book, Future World Order (2019/2020), on global risk which has been called a “must-read” (Dr Ian Bremmer, Kishore Mahbubani) written by a “global thinker to watch” (Dr Nouriel Roubini) and an “engaged scholar activist” (Dr Parag Khanna). Her second book A Global Spring (2021) considers a post-pandemic era; 50% of book profits will go to the WHO’s Covid-19 Solidarity Response Fund.

Her ideas have been featured in outlets including Huffington Post, Forbes, Medium, CNN, Observer. And on occasion she still consults on political risk with governments via Wikistrat, the world’s first geopolitical crowdsourced consultancy, also leading the annual NYU-Wikistrat Top Ten Global Risks project.

She is the author of ten-time award-winning debut political comic book for tweens, The Global Kid (2016), and is launching the VR/AR comic sequel, The Global Kid: A VR/AR Political Book (2021), in partnership with award-winning edtech startup Musemio. The comic won the 15th Annual Moonbeam Children’s Book Award and is a finalist in the Digital Female Leader Award 2021 in the category ‘Global Hero’. Maha’s upcoming book, ‘Global Spring:
Predictions for a Post-Pandemic World’, will be released in Spring 2023.

Previously, she was a visiting fellow at the London School of Economic’s Institute of Global Affairs; a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute; chairwoman of the New Silk Road Generation, the first e-mentoring program for university students in Afghanistan; and a senior teaching fellow in the Politics and International Studies Department, SOAS University of London.

Dr Aziz is a Jordanian-born Pakistani who grew up in the Middle East (Jordan, Saudi Arabia), Southeast Asia (Singapore, Malaysia), Europe (UK, Greece) and the US. She is a social scientist trained at Brown (BA), Columbia (MA) and the LSE (MSc, PhD). She earned a Bachelor’s at Brown University, a Master’s at Columbia University, a Master’s and PhD at the LSE, and a research certification in Leveraging Crowds in the Public Sector at the NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering.