Mehdi Sanaei

He also founded the cultural centres of the Iranian embassies in Kazakhstan and Russia and between 1995 and 2003 he worked in these countries as a cultural counselor of Iran.

Sanaei is appointed recently (May 2022) as senior fellow of center for Governance and Public Management in Carleton University in Canada.in 2021 in cooperation with SPBGU he initiated the project of Iranistika encyclopaedia in Russian language that is prepared by Iranian and Russian Iranists.

He graduated in political science and international relation and during last years, participated in scientific and international conferences in various countries, including Qatar,Azerbaijan, Czech, Russia,Uzbekistan, South Africa, USA, China,Kazakhstan, France, Poland, Canada and othercountries.

He is also the founder and CEO of the Institute for Iran-Eurasia Studies (a.k.a. IRAS) since 2004.

IRAS is an independent, non-profit, non-governmental think tank and publisher based in Tehran whose mission is to analyze and promote the understanding of major issues and current affairs of Eurasia, Russia, China, India, Turkey, Central Asia and South Caucasus.

He has written and translated several books, and several of his works have been published in foreign languages.

Sanaei's last book is in Persian, Russia: Society, Politics and Government, and in Russian, "Conversations about the Future That Does Not Yet exist".

Sanaei was lawmaker at Iran’s Islamic Parliament (Majlis) from 2008 to 2013.

Mehdi Sanaei is an Iranian academic, politician, Professor in University of Tehran and Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the Russian Federation (2013–2019).

He was Senior Adviser to the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2019-2022

He is the founder and director of Russian Studies Department in the Faculty of World Studies, University of Tehran.