Professor Sadeq Bigdeli has been a member of the Law Faculty at SBU (National) University of Iran since 2017.

Before that, Dr. Sadeq Bigdeli was a senior lecturer in law at the University of Waikato in New Zealand where he taught international trade law, international law, administrative law, and jurisprudence.

Last summer, Professor Bigdeli was a visiting research Fellow at Osgoode Hall Law School’s Jack and Mae Nathanson Centre on Transnational Human Rights, Crime and Security.

While a law professor in New Zealand in 2014 and at the peak of negotiations over Iran’s Nuclear Deal, Dr. Bigdeli was invited by the Government of Iran (Ministry of Industry, Mining and Trade) to help manage the process of the country’s reintegration into the world economy.

He was assigned to guide Iran’s WTO accession file, trade agreements as well as bilateral economic dialogue with the EU, Switzerland and a number of other countries.

In his capacity as Chief Trade Negotiator appointed by the Minister for Industry, Mines and Trade, Dr. Bigdeli succeeded in garnering the diplomatic support of the majority of key WTO member States in the form of a collective statement at the General Council in favor of reactivating Iran’s accession process.

Together with the WTO Secretariat, he designed a roadmap for the resumption of Iran’s accession process for the first time.

He also designed a new strategy for Iran’s preferential trade agreements and led a few rounds of negotiations for a number of trade agreements including a free trade agreement with the Eurasian Economic Community.

Dr. Bigdeli resigned as soon as President Trump won the 2016 elections and took up a position at the SBU (National) University of Iran.

He then led a nationwide research project to formulate Iran’s first national trade policy document with a focus on industrial policy and environmental sustainability.

Dr. Bigdeli holds an MA and a PhD in law from the University of Bern, and an LLM (’09) from Harvard Law School.

He has co-edited two volumes with Cambridge University Press (2009) and Edward Elgar (2017) and published numerous articles and book chapters in the last decade.

He was a postdoctoral research Fellow at Georgetown Law School in 2011 and a lecturer at Harvard Institute for Global Law & Policy in Doha in 2014.