Shano Mohammed

Class of 2024

Hometown: Iraq

Shano is a first-year student from Iraq. She earned her bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Kirkuk. After graduating, Shano joined the UN Migration Agency (IOM) - Iraq Mission, where she served communities affected by ISIL across Iraq. Through her work with the UN, Shano was able to contextualize her own experiences as part of a family affected by conflict to advocate for solutions and to design and implement programs that consider both logic and humanity.

During her six years with IOM Iraq, first as a field researcher and later as a research coordinator, her work focused on migration, durable solutions, youth and women’s empowerment, displacement, integration and stabilization, and security and ethnic tensions. Working with research teams from Georgetown and Yale on longitudinal studies helped fuel Shano's interest in the humanities and evidence-based approaches to problems like those that affected her during her formative years. In the MAAS program, she hopes to contribute positively to the capacity in the region to deal with the aftermath of war and to contribute to a transformation to peace, inclusion, and stability.