Grant F. Smith lives in Washington, DC where he researches and writes about U.S. Middle East policy formulation. Smith is director of the nonprofit Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep). In his thirty-year professional career as a researcher, Smith has investigated financial services and global telecommunications industries, worked in twenty-two countries assessing the impact of regulatory and trade regime changes and managed multi-country research teams. Smith has a BA in International Relations from the University of Minnesota and MIM (Master of International Management) from the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul. Smith's first research experience examining lobbying took place in the late 1980s as a member of a Minnesota Citizen's League committee investigating public entities that used a significant percentage of their taxpayer-funded allocations to lobby elected officials for ever-larger appropriations.