Lara Setrakian

Lara Setrakian is the Co-Founder and Managing Editor of Syria Deeply. She’s spent more than five years as a foreign correspondent, covering the Middle East for television, radio, and digital platforms, reporting for ABC News, Bloomberg Television, the International Herald Tribune, the Business Insider, and Monocle Magazine. Lara was widely acclaimed for her groundbreaking use of social media in covering on Iran’s 2009 election protests and the Arab Awakening of 2011. Lara is a Young Global Leader with the World Economic Forum and was named one of the Top Women of 2012 by Marie Claire Magazine. Lara graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard University, with a degree in Government. She spends her leisure time practicing yoga, reading poetry, and cooking vegetarian meals.

Azeo Fables

Azeo Fables is the Co-Founder and Product Manager of Syria Deeply. He also runs Vizlingo, a patent-pending communication platform that automatically creates fun and expressive video messages out of plain text by translating words into a video-based language. Azeo’s background includes photography and video production for independent films and documentaries.  He has designed and authored web pages for personal and business use for nearly a decade. Azeo graduated from Northeastern University Magna Cum Laude with a degree in Philosophy and Spanish. Having visited over 40 countries, Azeo is passionate about travel, culture and is a hobby chef.

Soumyadeep Paul

Soumyadeep is the Lead Architect of Syria Deeply, overseeing technical development of the platform. He has served as the head of technology for State.com, a global opinion platform, and was a founding member and chief technology architect at Mixercast, a user-generated slideshow platform. Soum was also a founder of Breach Candy Group, a media art collective, and has produced and directed documentaries including “(What is) The White Matter” and “Rickshaaa: A Film On Three Wheels.” Soumyadeep serves as a Board Member of PETA Canada. He received his B. Tech in Computer Science from IIT Kanpur.

Mohammed Aly Sergie

Mohammed Aly Sergie is the Senior Editor at Syria Deeply. He previously reported on private equity deals for Dow Jones in New York and established a bureau for the news service in Saudi Arabia, where he covered major political and business stories in the kingdom. Mohammed was the first foreign correspondent on the ground to report on the border conflict between Saudi Arabia and the Houthi rebels in Yemen and covered the “Arab Spring” uprisings in Syria and Libya for The Wall Street Journal. Prior to his move to Riyadh, Mohammed covered sovereign wealth funds and investment banks in the U.A.E. and was part of the launch team for The National newspaper in Abu Dhabi. He is fluent in English and Arabic and has a B.A. in Political Science from Northwestern University.

Karen Leigh

Karen Leigh is Managing Editor of Syria Deeply. Previously, she reported from the Middle East and West Africa for publications including TIME, The New York Times, The Daily Beast and Foreign Policy. She’s prayed in an Afghan burn unit, ducked rubber bullets in Bahrain, imbibed with terror operatives in Burkina Faso and campaigned in rural Liberia with Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. Prior to those assignments, she spent a year covering new government initiatives for Mint/WSJ in New Delhi and traveled with the 2008 presidential candidates while reporting for Bloomberg News. Leigh got her start in TIME’s London bureau in 2006 and has since reported from Kabul to Moscow to Uzbekistan. When she’s not writing, she’s an ardent supporter of women’s education and can usually be found in an art gallery.

Brock Petrie

Brock is the Creative Director of Syria Deeply. Prior to his work with startups, he spent the previous 10 years working in the interactive marketing & advertising space, conceptualizing, creating and developing a wide variety of web campaigns for a miscellany of companies. When he’s not busy pushing pixels, Brock retreats to the backwoods of his home state of Minnesota to live as a mountain man for extended periods of time.

Arindam Biswas

Arindam is the Lead Developer responsible for building the back end of Syria Deeply. He has been a startup mentor and a serial entrepreneur for the past 10 years and is currently a founder at CollectiveZen, an award-winning technology services and solutions provider with clients in India and North America. Arindam bootstrapped his first startup in 2000 and went on to merge operations with Mixercast, where his roles included product design and management. His passions include the convergence of commoditized infrastructure, multi-gestural interfaces, the emerging ubiquity of the mobile Internet, and location-based services. His daily pursuit of happiness ends with a smile when he can make a difference in the lives of the next generation.

Kristin Nolan

Kristin is a Development and Educational Programs Director for Syria Deeply, handling partner outreach. Kristin has extensive experience in business development, grant administration, and strategic communications. Her focus has been in the non-profit sector, working on human rights in Arab and Muslim communities worldwide. Kristin graduated from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, earning an MA with Merit in Middle Eastern Studies and a BA Cum Laude in International Relations, with a specialization in Middle Eastern Studies and Cross-Cultural Communications. She speaks Spanish as well as Arabic and is in the process of learning French.

Katarina Montgomery

Katarina is a Digital Producer for Syria Deeply, coordinating product development, curating editorial content, and assisting on community management. Prior to that role, Katarina was an emerging markets strategy analyst at Accenture. Katarina has the eye of a traveler; she spent her childhood attending local schools in the Balkans trying to understand the nuanced intersection of culture, history, and conflict. Her interest in journalism was sparked during an internship at B92 in Belgrade, after spending a summer shadowing reporters during Serbia’s transition toward democracy. Katarina has a degree in International Affairs from George Washington University.

Alison Tahmizian Meuse

Alison Tahmizian Meuse is a Contributing Editor at Syria Deeply based in Beirut. She has spent the past four years in the Middle East, first as a researcher and economics reporter in Cairo, where she covered the Egyptian labor uprising on the eve of the January 25 revolution and the court battles surrounding the country’s privatization program. For the past year, she has reported on the Syrian revolt and its spillover into neighboring Lebanon as a correspondent for Agence France-Presse in Beirut. Alison’s journalist interests range from the emerging socially conscious rap scene in Beirut, to social change in the Caucasus and Turkey, to historic preservation in Egypt. She speaks Arabic and French and has a degree in International Affairs from George Washington’s Elliott School.

Michelle Lewis 

Michelle Lewis is the Copy Chief for News Deeply. She was previously copy chief for TIME magazine’s international editions, and has edited for Avaaz Daily Briefing, the Guardian, Ode, Entertainment Weekly and Architecture. She consults for the National Council for the Training of Journalists in the UK, and was formerly the NCTJ’s head of accreditation. She also works as a freelance travel writer.

Deborah Amos

Deborah Amos is an award-winning journalist with NPR News and the Senior Editorial Advisor for Syria Deeply. Her reports can be heard on NPR’s award-winning Morning Edition, All Things Considered and Weekend Edition. In 2009, Amos won the Edward Weintal Prize for Diplomatic Reporting from Georgetown University and in 2010 was awarded the Edward R. Murrow Life Time Achievement Award by Washington State University. Amos was part of a team of reporters who won a 2004 Alfred I. Dupont-Columbia Award for coverage of Iraq. A Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in 1991-1992, Amos was returned to Harvard in 2010 as a Shorenstein Fellow at the Kennedy School. In 2003, Amos returned to NPR after a decade in television news, including ABC’s Nightline and World News Tonight and the PBS programs NOW with Bill Moyers and Frontline. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Amos is also the author of Eclipse of the Sunnis: Power, Exile, and Upheaval in the Middle East (Public Affairs, 2010) and Lines in the Sand: Desert Storm and the Remaking of the Arab World (Simon and Schuster, 1992).

Alex Lovell-Troy

Alex is the Senior Technology Advisor to Syria Deeply, guiding strategy on technology and development. He currently serves as the CTO of OneLeap, a social entrepreneurship platform, and advisor to Agora Partnerships and the OTI project at the New America Foundation. Alex brings technical guidance from his career spanning current web architecture, early cloud computing, large-scale science, and monetary management in virtual currencies. The projects he’s built include the international multi-currency billing systems at Linden Lab, which handled the $700M internal economy for Second Life; the control infrastructure for the world’s largest optical telescope; and many infrastructure management tools for the cloud.  Alex graduated with a computer science degree from Monmouth College and has taught Linux Administration and Programming at the University of Illinois and the University of Arizona.

Nadine Apelian Dobbs

Nadine Apelian Dobbs is the Senior Advisor for Strategy and Outreach for Syria Deeply. She is a strategic communications consultant to foreign policy, public affairs, and media organizations. Her work has included Chicago Ideas Week, an annual gathering of global thought leaders co-chaired by Groupon founders Brad Keywell and Eric Lefkofsky; the 2012 NATO Summit, where she was a media consultant to The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, a member of the city’s NATO Host Committee. Prior to that, Nadine was Assistant Director of Communications at the Council on Foreign Relations and then head of media relations for Foreign Affairs. She also has worked broadcast media and the national security desk at the ACLU. Nadine graduated from Barnard College of Columbia University and received a Master’s Degree in Political Science and International Relations from New York University.

Stephen Armstrong

Stephen Armstrong is the President-Elect of the National Council for the Social Studies. He is a social studies department supervisor for the West Hartford, CT public schools. Steve is also an adjunct instructor of history at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, CT. He is a past-president of the Connecticut Council for the Social Studies and the New England History Teachers Association, and has been a teacher-in-residence at the Connecticut State Board of Education. Steve has been involved in the re-writing of the Connecticut social studies frameworks. He has given countless workshops on the local, state, and national levels on the use of film and music in the social studies classroom and on topics related to historical memory.

The Asfari Foundation is a registered British charity set up by the Ayman Asfari family in 2006. It aims to help young people make a valuable contribution to their society by empowering them through education, research and the power of free thinking.  It also supports programmes that encourage the development of civil society in the Arab world, and provides humanitarian relief to people affected by emergency situations in its target countries of Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and the UK.  Our vision is for and educated, open and just society, based on the rule of law, which promotes development and progress through knowledge, tolerance and integrity.  The Foundation works through partner organisations and supports them with funding and advice and monitors their work to ensure they achieve shared objectives.

http://www.asfarifoundation.org.uk

Founded in 1990 by a group of prominent U.S. women journalists, the International Women’s Media Foundation is a Washington-based organization that believes the news media world-wide are not truly free and representative without the equal voice of women. The IWMF celebrates the courage of women journalists who overcome threats and oppression to speak out on global issues. The IWMF’s programs empower women journalists with the training, support and network to become leaders in the news industry.

http://www.iwmf.org