Sherif Mansour is a Program Officer, Middle East at Freedom House. He is also the Vice-President of the International Quranic Center in North Virginia since October 2006. He also spent one year serving as a Fellow and Conference Coordinator at the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy in Washington DC. Before then, he worked for the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies in Egypt where he established and led the Independent Committee on Election Monitoring (ICEM), a nation wide election monitoring coalition, which monitored the Egyptian Presidential and the Parliament elections of 2005. Mr. Mansour is an established writer and researcher on democracy and human rights issues in Egypt and the Arab World. He wrote and edited various articles, books, and reports on civil society, democratization, and reform in the Middle East region. He was honored by the Word (Al-Kalema) Center for Human Rights in 2004 for his efforts to promote democracy and Human rights. He obtained his BA degree in Education and Information Technology from al-Azhar University in Cairo in 2002 and is currently pursuing his Master degree in International Affairs at the Fletcher School of Tufts University.