Neysun Mahboubi

About Neysun Mahboubi

Neysun A. Mahboubi is Director of the Penn Project on the Future of U.S.-China Relations at the University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches various courses related to Chinese history, law, and policy, and hosts the China Studies podcast. He is also a Non-Resident Senior Fellow with the Asia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.

Neysun is a 1997 graduate of Princeton University, where he majored in politics, learned Chinese, and won the highest departmental prize for his senior thesis on Chinese administrative law. He also served as class president and Honor Committee chair. He completed his JD in 2001 at Columbia Law School, where he was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar.

After graduating from law school, Neysun clerked for the Hon. Douglas P. Woodlock of the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts. He then served as a trial attorney for the Federal Programs Branch of the US Department of Justice. He was a fellow of the China Law Center, and Tutor in Law, at Yale Law School, and has also taught at Princeton University's School of Public & International Affairs and the University of Connecticut School of Law. He frequently comments on Chinese law and policy developments and U.S.-China relations for various media outlets. At the University of Pennsylvania, he's a Research Affiliate of the Penn Program on Regulation, for whom he hosts the Law & Governance series, as well as Penn's Center for the Study of Contemporary China.

Neysun is a member of the Baha'i­ Faith, and his parents immigrated to the United States from Iran in the 1970s.