Director of Strategic Partnerships Brian Efird is the Director for Strategic Partnerships at KAPSARC. His responsibilities include planning and oversight of KAPSARC’s global outreach… Brian Efird is the Director for Strategic Partnerships at KAPSARC. His responsibilities include planning and oversight of KAPSARC’s global outreach and engagement, as well as forging multiparty collaborations that conceptualize and facilitate high impact, applied research projects in the areas of energy economics, policy, and sustainability. He previously served as the Program Director for Policy and Decision Science, managing a team of researchers that covered a global program of work focused on the nexus between geopolitics, domestic and local politics, energy, and climate change. This included multi-disciplinary analysis of the geopolitics of energy and the environment, quantitative models of collective decision-making processes (CDMPs), geospatial information system (GIS) applications to energy economics and energy policy, and the impact of political phenomena on global energy markets. Dr. Efird was previously a Senior Research Fellow at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C.; a consultant on defense and international security matters in Washington; and a consultant applying quantitative models to support corporate, investment banking, and legal negotiations in New York. He received a Ph.D. in Political Science and M.A. in International Studies from Claremont Graduate University.

Expertise

• Geopolitics of Energy
• Behavioral Modeling
• Defense and National Security Studies
• Strategic Communication

Project Planning and Management Director Imtenan Al-Mubarak is a Project Planning and Management director. She was previously a research fellow at KAPSARC, focusing on policy… Imtenan Al-Mubarak is a Project Planning and Management director. She was previously a research fellow at KAPSARC, focusing on policy research with an emphasis on data science and machine learning. Before joining KAPSARC, Imtenan worked at several companies in Chicago, and at Electronia in Dammam and Saudi Aramco in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. She holds a master’s degree with distinction from DePaul University, Chicago, for which she was awarded the Golden Key International Honor. She is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) and a member of several professional organizations. She is a Future Energy Leader at the World Energy Council in London and a board member at a non-profit organization in San Francisco. She also holds a patent in the United States (issued November 8, 2016).

Expertise

• تحليل السلوك، دور نظرية الالعاب في الاقتصاد الحديث، نمذجة المساومات، المحتوي الرقمي، علوم الجيوسياسية و سياسات الطاقة والاقتصاد في دول مجلس التعاون الخليجي بالاضافة إلى ادارة التحول واستراتيجيات التواصل

Research Lead Lama is a research lead working under the Transportation and Infrastructure Content Center. Lama has a B.Sc. degree in computer… Lama is a research lead working under the Transportation and Infrastructure Content Center. Lama has a B.Sc. degree in computer science from Effat University and an M.Sc. degree in software engineering from the University of Oxford. Lama is a programmer, data modeler and software engineer working in data modeling and software integration. She is also part of the Geographical Information Systems (GIS) team, working in spatial analytics and modeling. Lama was also one of the main contributors to the KAPSARC Toolkit for Behavioral Analysis (KTAB).

Expertise

• Energy Sustainability and Social Science