Anies Baswedan is currently the President of Paramadina University in Jakarta, Indonesia. He is the initiator and chairman of Indonesia Teaching Movement, which deploys the best graduates of local and foreign universities to remote areas in Indonesia to teach as elementary schoolteachers for one year to improve the quality of education.

Anies was educated in Indonesia and the US. He has received several awards including the ‘50 Most Distinguished Northern Illinois University Alumni’ Award, the Fulbright Scholarship and the 2004 Gerald Maryanov Fellow.

Foreign Policy Magazine named him as one of ‘the 100 public intellectuals’ and the World Economic Forum included him in ‘the 2009 Young Global Leaders’. In June 2010, the Institute for International Policy Studies awarded him the Nakasone Yasuhiro Award. In July 2010, the Royal Islamic Strategic Studies Centre (Jordan) listed him in ‘the 500 Most Influential Muslims in the world’.