Ali Adeeb Alnaemi serves as clinical associate professor for Arabic and media at NYU since receiving his MA in journalism there in 2010. He was the news editor of The New York Times Baghdad bureau before coming to the U.S. as a Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan. He writes for several publications in Arabic and English and conducts research in Middle Eastern politics, media, and methods of teaching the Arabic language.

Wolf Blitzer, known for his political and international reporting, is the longtime anchor of “The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer” on CNN. Traveling as a correspondent around the world from Mexico to North Korea, he is especially recognized for his Middle East expertise, often covering breaking news stories while on site. He has interviewed seven U.S. presidents from Obama to Ford, many foreign heads of state, including the Dalai Lama, Margaret Thatcher, Asif Ali Zardari, Nelson Mandela, and Mikhail Gorbachev. He started his journalism careering in Tel Aviv, reporting for Reuters and the Jerusalem Post. Blitzer has authored two books and his work has earned him numerous broadcasting and reporting prizes and honorary degrees.

Kim Gamel became managing editor at Honolulu Civil Beat after five years as Asia-Pacific correspondent for Stars and Stripes. During nearly 20 years at the Associated Press, she served as Middle East news editor based in Cairo, Iraq news editor in Baghdad and a roving correspondent with assignments in India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Libya. Gamel started her reporting career at the Moscow Tribune in Moscow and holds a master's degree in journalism from Northwestern University. She is an alum of the Knight-Wallace Fellowships program at the University of Michigan and an accredited solutions journalism trainer.

Aaron David Miller focuses on U.S. foreign policy as a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. For 25 years he served at the State Department as a historian analyst, negotiator, and advisor to both Democratic and Republican Secretaries of State helping to formulate U.S. policy for the Middle East and Arab-Israeli peace process. Miller was a Distinguished Fellow and the director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He has published five books and is a frequent commentator on CNN, NPR and a contributor to The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, CNN.com and other publications. Miller has received the Department of State’s Superior and Meritorious Honor Awards. He’s also a recipient of the Ellis Island Medal of Honor.

Sudarsan Raghavan is a correspondent at large for The Washington Post. He has spent the past three decades mostly as a foreign correspondent posted in Baghdad, Cairo, Johannesburg, Kabul, Madrid and Nairobi. Raghavan has covered Islamist movements, global terrorism, the Taliban’s repeated rise and fall and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has also extensively reported on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the 2011 Arab Spring revolutions and their fallout, as well as the 2004 Darfur genocide. As Baghdad bureau chief, Raghavan ran The Post's largest overseas operation during the Iraq War's most violent years. He began his career freelancing from the Afghan-Pakistan border and later post-apartheid South Africa and has received numerous awards for his work.

Gerard Ryle is the director of ICIJ, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. He led the worldwide teams of hundreds of journalists working on the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers investigations, the two biggest investigative collaborations in journalism history. Before joining ICIJ as its first non-American director in September 2011, Ryle spent more than 20 years working as an investigative reporter and editor in Australia. He started his career in journalism in his native Ireland. He is a book author and TED speaker and he has won or shared in more than 50 journalism awards from seven different countries, including the 2017 Pulitzer Prize and, on behalf of ICIJ, an honorary degree from the University of Liege.

David K. Shipler has been writing online at the Shipler Report since 2010 and co-hosts a podcast, Two Reporters. The Pulitzer Prize winning author of seven books reported for the New York Times in New York, Saigon, Moscow (bureau chief), Jerusalem (bureau chief) and Washington, D.C. (chief diplomatic correspondent). Shipler has been a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution and a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He was presented with numerous journalism awards and honorary degrees and held teaching positions at Dartmouth College, Princeton and the American University. He was executive producer, writer, and narrator of two PBS documentaries on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, one of which won a DuPont-Columbia Award.

Jackie Spinner is associate professor of journalism at Columbia College in Chicago, Op-Ed contributor for The Washington Post and editor of the Gateway Journalism Review. As Baghdad bureau chief for The Washington Post she reported from countries across the Middle East. Spinner also reported for the Christian Science Monitor, Chicago Tribune, MSNBC, PBS, CNN, BBC, and other news outlets and is the author of “Tell Them I Didn’t Cry.” She taught digital journalism as a Fulbright Scholar in Oman, founded two independent student newspapers in the Middle East and was featured in a PBS Frontline documentary on reporting the war in Iraq. She has produced and directed two documentaries, “Don’t Forget Me” and “Morocco, Morocco,” which were shown on PBS.