Dr. Maha Hosain Aziz focuses on global risk & prediction across varied industries and disciplines. She is a professor in the MA International Relations Program at New York University's Graduate School of Arts & Sciences (NYU GSAS) specializing in global risk, which she also teaches at Pioneer Academics and other e-learning education startups. She is a risk expert at the World Economic Forum's Global Future Council on Frontier Risks for 2020-2021. She is an author who launched her first bestselling, award-winning book on global risk, FUTURE WORLD ORDER (2019), with fellowship support from the London School of Economics' Institute of Global Affairs; she launched the second edition (2020) at the Commonwealth Secretariat, with 15% of profits going to her brother's memorial fund for Syrian refugee youth via charity Peace & Sport. The sequel, THE COVID-19 EFFECT (2021), is out in Q1 2021, with 50% of profits going to the WHO's COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund. She is also a cartoonist who is releasing a VR/AR political comic book for tweens (2021) – a spinoff of her five-time award-winning debut political comic book, The Global Kid (2016). Dr. Aziz is a former Businessweek columnist and Huffington Post blogger who now writes on global risk for Medium, Thrive Global, and other outlets. On occasion, she still consults on risk with governments and corporates via geopolitical crowdsourced consultancy Wikistrat and other networks.
Previously, Dr. Aziz was also a senior fellow at NY think tank, World Policy Institute. She served as chairwoman of a small team that co-launched the New Silk Road Generation, the first e-mentoring program for university students in Afghanistan. She was a Senior Teaching Fellow in the Politics and International Studies Department at the University of London's SOAS focused on South Asian politics. She taught an undergraduate course on British politics and democratic institutions at the London School of Economics (LSE), winning three teaching awards. At the LSE, she was the C&J Modi/Narayanan Fellow while pursuing her doctoral research on the moral economy.
Before her Ph.D., she worked in investment banking and media; she earned a Bachelor's at Brown University, a Master's at Columbia University, a Master's at the LSE, and a research certification in Leveraging Crowds in the Public Sector at the NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering.