Yerevan Saeed is a nonresident senior fellow with the Iraq Initiative in the Atlantic Council’s Middle East programs. Saeed is the Barzani scholar-in-residence in the Department of Politics, Governance & Economics at American University’s School of International Service, where he also serves as director of the Global Kurdish Initiative for Peace. His research focuses on the political economy, energy politics, conflict resolution, and Kurdish studies, with emphasis on Iraq, Turkey, Iran, the Gulf states, and the broader Middle East.

Saeed has held academic and research positions including lecturer at the University of Kurdistan Hewler, visiting scholar at Arab Gulf Institute, and associate fellow at the Middle East Research Institute.

Professionally, he worked as a Middle East specialist at Stratfor in 2013 and served as the White House correspondent in Washington, DC, for Rudaw TV in 2015, covering US foreign policy and regional developments. From 2003 to 2007, Saeed worked in Kurdistan and Iraq as a journalist and translator for prominent international outlets including the New York Times, NPR, the Wall Street Journal, BBC, and the Guardian. These experiences continue to shape his research and policy perspectives.

A regular contributor to scholarly and policy discourse, Saeed’s work appears in outlets such as AGSIW, the Wilson Center, the New Lines Institute, the Diplomatic Courier, the Hill, Fikra Forum (The Washington Institute), the Middle East Institute, Al Jazeera, Majalla Magazine, and Rudaw.

He is frequently quoted by global media, including CNN, Voice of America, NPR, S&P Global, Petroleum Economist, Voice of Russia, and the National, and often presents at international conferences