Tarek advises and helps shape Crisis Group’s analysis of how economic factors impact conflict at the global, regional and country levels. From January 2020-April 2021, he was Crisis Group’s Chief Economist and Program Director, Future of Conflict. From July 2018-December 2019 he was Crisis Group's Senior Economic Adviser. 

Tarek has spent two decades working on conflict issues across academia, philanthropy and policy analysis. He is an Assistant Professor of Strategy at Washington University in St. Louis and a Nonresident Fellow of the Brookings Institution's Global Economy and Development Program. Tarek has published in the American Economic Review, AEJ: Microeconomics, Foreign Affairs and Harvard Business Review.

Tarek is an associate of Princeton's Empirical Studies of Conflict Project and an affiliate of LSE's International Growth Centre. From 2015-2016, he was the ESOC Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton's School of Public and International Affairs. From 2006-2009, he oversaw conflict prevention grants at the Humanity United foundation. He has also worked with the Center for Global Development, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the United States Institute of Peace and the World Bank. He holds a Ph.D. from University of California, Berkeley and a B.S. from Stanford University.