Dr. Ashraf Ghani --- Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai (Pashto: اشرف غني احمدزی‎, Persian: اشرف غنی احمدزی‎) is an Afghan politician, economist and anthropologist. He was elected the President-elect of Afghanistan on September 21, 2014. Usually referred to as Ashraf Ghani, he served as Finance Minister and as the chancellor of Kabul University. -- Before returning to Afghanistan in 2002, Ghani, worked with the World Bank. As the Finance Minister of Afghanistan between July 2002 and December 2004, he led Afghanistan's attempted economic recovery after the collapse of the Taliban government. --- Ghani was born in 1949 in the Logar Province of Afghanistan. He is an ethnic Pashtun of Ahmadzai tribe, he completed his primary and secondary education in Habibia High School in Kabul. He attended the American University in Beirut, where earned his bachelors degree in 1973. Ghani met his future wife, Rula Ghani while studying at the American University of Beirut. He returned to Afghanistan in 1977 to teach anthropology at Kabul University before receiving a government scholarship in 1977 to pursue hisMaster's degree in anthropology at Columbia University in the United States. --- Academic career -- When the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) communist party came to power in 1978, most of the male members of his family were imprisoned and Ghani was stranded in the United States. He stayed at Columbia University and earned his PhD in Cultural Anthropology. He was invited to teach at University of California, Berkeley in 1983, and then at Johns Hopkins University from 1983 to 1991. During this period he became a frequent commentator on the BBC Farsi/Persian and Pashto services, broadcast in Afghanistan. He has also attended the Harvard-INSEAD and World Bank-Stanford Graduate School of Business's leadership training program. He served on the faculty of Kabul University (1973–77), Aarhus University in Denmark (1977), University of California, Berkeley (1983), and Johns Hopkins University (1983–1991). His academic research was on state-building and social transformation. In 1985 he completed a year of fieldwork researching Pakistani Madrasas as a Fulbright Scholar. He also studied comparative religion. --- Ghani was tipped as a candidate to succeed Kofi Annan as Secretary General of the United Nations at the end of 2006[4] in a front page report in The Financial Times (September 18, 2006) that quoted him as saying, “I hope to win, through ideas.” Two distinguished experts on international relations told the paper that "the UN would be very lucky indeed to have him" and praised his "tremendous intellect, talent and capacity." --- In 2005 Ghani gave keynote speeches for meetings including the American Bar Association’s International Rule of Law Symposium, the Trans-Atlantic Policy Network, the annual meeting of the Norwegian Government’s development staff, CSIS’ meeting on UN reform, the UN-OECD-World Bank’s meeting on Fragile States and TEDGlobal.[5] He contributed to the Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. -- Read More, From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashraf_Ghani