About Vafa
Vafa is a political philosopher and public policy strategist. His work addresses the ethical dimensions of social, political and economic life. He was the inaugural Executive Director for Research and Policy at the Australian Public Policy Institute (2021-2025) and before that taught political philosophy at the University of Oxford (2018-2020). He previously worked in Canberra at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, including in its policy planning branch, and the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, and served as an Australian diplomat in Afghanistan, the Balkans and to the United Nations in Vienna. Vafa has been a Visiting Researcher at Google DeepMind and a Carr Center Fellow at Harvard University. He currently serves on the management committee of the Centre for Relational Care and on the research committee of Amplify. He is a graduate of the University of Sydney, where he won a university medal, Harvard University, where he completed a Master in Public Administration as a Fulbright Scholar, and the University of Oxford, where he completed his doctorate as a John Monash Scholar.
