World Bank Group's Middle East and North Africa Climate Roadmap

Ahmad Dallal

President

The American University in Cairo

AUC’s 13th President Ahmad S. Dallal is an accomplished academic leader and renowned scholar with U.S. and regional higher education expertise. Dallal is the former dean of Georgetown University in Qatar and served as provost at the American University of Beirut (AUB) from 2009 to 2015. A prominent scholar of Islamic studies, he has taught at AUB, Stanford University, Yale University, Smith College and Georgetown University, where he also served as chair of the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies. Dallal’s leadership experience includes spearheading institutional transformations that have included everything from closing budget deficits and administrative process reforms to introducing key performance indicators and quality measures for academic programs and increasing scholarly production. Throughout his administrative experience, Dallal led the introduction of several dozen university policies, including overseeing Title lX compliance on discriminatory harassment. He also increased the socioeconomic diversity of the student body through scholarships and financial aid. With several decades of teaching, research and leadership at some of the top universities in the United States, Dallal is a seasoned expert on U.S.-style liberal arts universities and how they operate.  Coupled with that is his extensive experience in the Middle East at both AUB and Georgetown University in Qatar. 

Stephen Hammer

Advisor, Global Partnerships and Strategy

The World Bank Group

Stephen Hammer serves as Advisor, Global Partnerships and Strategy, to the WBG’s Vice President for Sustainable Development and the Global Director of the WBG’s Climate Change team.  Dr. Hammer leads on the Bank’s engagement on climate change issues with the United Nations, the G7, and the G20, and other development partners.  He previously served as the Bank’s Manager of Climate Policy, where his team had responsibility for shaping the WBG’s global perspective on climate change policy, mainstreaming climate change into Bank Group operations, and delivering specialized technical advisory services to clients. Prior to joining the climate team, Dr. Hammer led the Bank’s global work on cities and climate change issues, working extensively in Vietnam, Ethiopia, Romania, and Egypt.  Between 2005 and 2013, he taught full-time at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Columbia University, where his courses and research focused on urban energy systems policy and technology and how climate change will affect different urban systems. While teaching in New York, Dr. Hammer served as an advisor to then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s PlaNYC initiative. In 2007 he helped co-found and until 2012 served as co-Director of the Urban Climate Change Research Network (UCCRN), a global network of researchers examining climate change from an urban perspective. Dr. Hammer holds a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics, an M.P.P. from Harvard University, and a B.S. degree from University of California, Davis.

Rajesh Balasubramanian

Senior Water Supply and Sanitation Specialist

The World Bank Group

Rajesh Balasubramanian is a Senior Water and Sanitation Specialist with the World Bank since 2013 currently based in Cairo and is the team leader for the Sustainable Rural Sanitation Services Program (SRSSP). He was earlier based in New Delhi where he was responsible for jointly leading the $1 billion support to the Government of India on the cleaning and rejuvenation of the River Ganga. Prior to coming to the World Bank, Rajesh worked over 12 years in advising government, private sector and multi-lateral agencies on infrastructure sector.

Federica Ranghieri

Program Leader Sustainable Development

The World Bank Group

Federica Ranghieri is the Program Leader for Egypt, Yemen, and Djibouti based in Cairo. In her previous capacity at the World Bank, she was the Senior Disaster Risk Management (DRM) specialist in the South Asia Region of the World Bank. In that role, she serves as South Asia Region DRM coordinator, and co-leads climate resilience projects in Sri Lanka, as well as the Afghanistan DRM program and several analytical works on multi-peril risk assessment, resettlement policies and governance and institutional assessments in India, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan. She managed the Learning from Mega disasters project, which led to the Sendai Conference in 2012. She was also part of the World Development Report (WDR) 2015 – Managing Risk for Development team. She previously worked for the East Asia Region, as well as the Carbon Finance business unit at the World Bank. She was assistant professor at the University of Milan where she lectured on environmental policy and environmental and social communication. She also worked for the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) on stakeholder engagement and corporate social responsibility, and for the private sector, mainly industrial companies, as advisor on environmental accounting, environmental management, climate change measures, Kyoto Protocol and EU Emissions Trading System compliance.

Mohamed Nada

Senior Urban Specialist

The World Bank Group

Mohamed Nada has over seventeen years of professional experience in participatory governance, socio-economic research, organizational capacity building, and youth and women’s empowerment. Worked in Egypt and abroad and interacted with international/local NGOs, and multinational corporations. His field of interest includes strategic and participative planning, governance and accountability approaches, social justice, human rights, and civil society strengthening. Dr. Nada is currently a Senior Urban Specialist at the World Bank. Prior to joining the World Bank, Dr. Nada worked for UN-Habitat as a program manager for the Urban Policies, Governance and Legislation Program. Prior to that, he worked for CARE International as the Program Director for the Governance and Civic Engagement program. He has also undertaken a wide range of consultancy assignments to the USAID, DFID, ESDF, and other donors and international organizations, through his work as a senior researcher at the socio-economic research department of Environmental Quality International.

Fahad Kimera

Senior Manager for Agriculture - Center for Applied Research on the Environment and Sustainability

The American University in Cairo

Fahad Kimera holds a MSc in Sustainable Development, a graduate diploma in Research Methodologies and Application, and a BSc in Agricultural Sciences. He teaches at the Sustainable Development graduate program at AUC, instructs a Water, Energy and Food (WEF) Diploma and other capacity building programs. He has published relevant papers in integrated agricultural production systems, agricultural water-use efficiency, wastewater re-use, and salinity management. His areas of expertise include: WEF Model, sustainable agriculture, greenhouse controlled food production, precision farming, saline irrigation, and integrated agriculture aquaculture.

Sherif Goubran

Assistant Professor and Director of Graduate Program

Department of Architecture - The American University in Cairo

Sherif Goubran is an assistant professor of sustainable architecture in the department of architecture, School of Sciences and Engineering, at The American University in Cairo (AUC), where he joined as joined is as an instructor in the fall of 2020. He completed his PhD in the Individualized Program (INDI) at Concordia University in 2021. His PhD research was funded by several prestigious grants and awards, including the Vanier Canada Graduate scholarship. Before that, he completed a MASc in building engineering in 2016, focusing on energy efficiency in commercial buildings. He holds a BS in architecture from AUC.

Goubran's research focus includes building sustainability and sustainability assessment, sustainability in architectural design and human approaches in design. Specifically, his work investigates the theory and practice of sustainability in the built environment, combines qualitative and quantitative methodologies, and explores the shift from incremental to transformational design. He conducts interdisciplinary research in design, architecture, building engineering and real-estate finance. He is also involved in several sustainability committees and projects on the student and administrative levels and in the broader community.

Samer Atallah

Associate Professor and Associate Dean - AUC School of Business

The American University in Cairo

Samer Atallah has been an associate professor of economics at the School of Business at The American University in Cairo since 2011. He was a visiting scholar at the Center for Democracy, Development and Rule of Law at Stanford University in 2016 and a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago Center in Paris during Winter 2014. His research interests are in political economy and development economics. His research also covers game theory applications on the political economy of democratization and quantitative analysis of election results. His research is published in the European Journal of Political Economy, International Journal of Economic Theory and the Theoretical Economic Letters. His research work in development economics covers intergenerational inequality, informality and quantitative analysis of household surveys. He has earned his PhD and MA in economics from McGill University. The title of his PhD thesis is Essays on Resource-Dependent Economies: Political Economy and Strategic Behavior. He also holds a MSc in engineering from the University of California at Berkeley. He is a research fellow at the Economic Research Forum, and a member of the Canadian Economics Association and the Middle East Economic Association.