Professor Hoda Mahmoudi holds The Bahá’í Chair for World Peace at the University of Maryland, College Park. As holder of this endowed academic program since July 2012, Professor Mahmoudi collaborates with a wide range of scholars, researchers, and practitioners to advance interdisciplinary examination and discourse on global peace.  She has developed and promotes a sound scientific basis for knowledge and strategies to explore the role of social actors and structures in removing obstacles to peace and creating paths to a better world.

Before joining the University of Maryland faculty, Professor Mahmoudi served as the coordinator of the Research Department at the Bahá’í World Centre in Haifa, Israel from 2001 to 2012. Previously, Dr. Mahmoudi was Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at Northeastern Illinois University, where she was also a faculty member in the Department of Sociology. Professor Mahmoudi served as Vice President and Dean of Olivet College, where she was instrumental in an institutional transformation that generated national recognition.  She has presented her ideas on institutional change before various high-profile forums, including Harvard University’s Institute for Educational Management and the Wharton Institute for Research on Higher Education at the University of Pennsylvania.

Professor Mahmoudi’s writings have appeared in leading publications, including Organizational Studies, Group and Organization Studies, International Review of Modern Sociology, and The Journal of Bahá’í Studies.  Her chapter on “Altruism and Extensively in the Bahá'í Religion” (co-authored with Wendy Heller) appears in the volume, Embracing the Other: Philosophical, Psychological, and Historical Perspectives on Altruism.  The University of Maryland has published Professor’s Mahmoudi’s Bahá'í inaugural lecture, Vision and Prospects for World Peace (2013).  The publication addresses themes central to building a more peaceful world, including human nature and its capacity to mobilize for good and ill, and the role of education in transforming not only individuals but also institutions and societies at large.