Paul Salem is the Director of the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut. He taught at the American University of Beirut between 1987 and 1999. He is the founder and former director (1989-1999) of the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies, Lebanon’s first policy think tank.  He was also the Director of the Fares Foundation in Lebanon (1999-2006), one of Lebanon’s leading development and charity foundations. He has written for the New York Times, the Financial Times, and other Western papers, as well as Arab and Lebanese papers. He is a frequent commentator on Arab and international media. He was on the review board of the UNDP Arab Human Development Report and a primary author in the World Bank’s recent study on Governance in the Arab World. He is a founding member of several advocacy NGOs in Lebanon including the Lebanese Association for Democratic Elections, the Lebanese Transparency Association, and the Lebanese Conflict Resolution Network. Most recently, he was a member of the National Commission for Electoral Law Reform in Lebanon. Dr. Salem pursued his undergraduate and graduate studies at Harvard University, receiving his Ph.D. in political science from there in 1987.