Marguerite Bouraad Nash, is the Vice Chair and Student Advisor of the Global Peace and Security Program. She is a political scientist specializing in international and Middle Eastern politics. She was born in Lebanon where she obtained her high school education. Both her undergraduate and graduate work was done at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she earned her B. A. in English Literature and Comparative Religion, and her M. A. and Ph.D. degrees in political science with emphases on international relations, Middle Eastern politics and Islamic studies.

Prior to serving as Vice Chair for the GPS Program, Marguerite Bouraad Nash coordinated most of the Global Peace and Security Colloquia series, participated in many of them, and wrote grant proposals to fund the GPS colloquia, symposia, and other GPS projects. She teaches several GPS courses, including Theories of Peace, Conflict and Violence, World Society in Transition: Building Enduring Peace, Theory and Practice of Nonviolence, The United Nations and Global Politics, Terrorism, and War and Peace in the Middle East. She is also a lecturer in the Political Science Department at UCSB, and in Off-Campus Studies at the Ventura Center where she teaches courses on Politics of the Middle East, and the Middle East in World Affairs, Third World Politics, American Foreign Policy, and International Relations. She is a member of the Middle East and Islamic faculty where she serves on the curriculum committee.

Marguerite Bouraad Nash is the 1990 recipient the Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award, and the 2004 UCSB Alumni Association Teaching Award. Marguerite Bouraad Nash has served as an Expert Witness in court cases involving individuals of Middle Eastern descent before civil courts, and in Immigration and Naturalization Service Proceedings before the United States Department of Justice Executive Office for Immigration Review, Immigration Court, in Detroit, Michigan, San Francisco, and Los Angeles California. Her work required her to write briefs for the court and to testify in person and telephonically.

Marguerite Bouraad Nash critiques numerous books and manuscripts for a number of prestigious publishing companies in both the U.S. and the United Kingdom; she has co-authored a monograph on ORV recreation and a teachers manual on comparative politics; chaired several panels on religion and politics in the Middle East, American foreign policy after the cold war, and a panel on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In addition, she has served as a commentator at the Hutchins Center Dialogues on the Middle East and Arab-Israeli and the Palestinian-Israeli Problems. She lectures extensively on the on the Middle East, and is a frequent speaker and analyst on local television and radio stations on Middle East and Third World politics.