Maha Hosain Aziz – Keynote Speaker

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 the American Apparel & Footwear Association. Her recent virtual and in-person speaking engagements have focused on explaining the effect of the Ukraine-Russia crisis and Covid-19 on geopolitics, politics, economy and society – and what may emerge in a post-pandemic world.

Maha is the author of the seven-time award-winning book, Future World Order (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 (2022) offers predictions for what’s next in a post-pandemic world. Her ideas have been featured in outlets including Huffington Post, Forbes, Medium, CNN, Observer and Tatler. 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 seven-time award-winning debut political comic book for tweens, The Global Kid (2016), which she drew. She also launched the VR/AR comic sequel, The Global Kid: A VR/AR Political Book (2021), in partnership with award-winning edtech startup Musemio. The comic was a finalist in the Germany-based 2021 Digital Female Leader Awards in the category ‘Global Hero’ and won the US-based 2021 Moonbeam Children’s Book Award.

Previously, she was a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics’ 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 Maha 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.