Lana Salman is a postdoctoral research fellow with the Middle East Initiative at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs for the 2021-2022 academic year. Dr. Salman holds a PhD in City & Regional Planning with a designated emphasis in Global Metropolitan Studies from the University of California Berkeley.

She is a feminist scholar of international development and her research focuses on local governance, women’s role in democratizing politics and the ways in which international financial institutions reconfigure the cities of the Global South. Her dissertation explores how poor dwellers from the peripheries of Tunisian cities turned municipalities into terrains of intense contestation where they articulated claims for access to basic services in the aftermath of the 2011 revolution. She has conducted research in Tunisia and Lebanon. Before pursuing her doctoral studies, Dr. Salman served as a consultant to the Chief Technical Advisor of the Lebanese Prime Minister, and was an Urban Specialist at the World Bank’s Middle East and North Africa Urban and Social Development Department.