Mohamed Fahmy, a dual Canadian-Egyptian award-winning journalist, war correspondent, and author, entered Iraq on the first day of the war in 2003 with the Los Angeles Times. He has reported extensively on the Middle East and North Africa. In 2012 he was among the CNN team honoured with a Peabody Award for the network’s coverage of the Arab Spring. He won the Tom Renner Investigative Reporting Award in 2012 for producing the CNN Freedom Project documentary series Death in the Desert, which exposed the trafficking of Sub-Sahara Africans to Israel through Sinai-Egypt. He was appointed Egypt Bureau Chief of Al Jazeera English in 2013. He is the recipient of the Canadian Committee for World Press Freedom Award from UNESCO. He and his wife, Marwa Omara, founded the Fahmy Foundation non-profit in 2015 to provide financial assistance and advocate on behalf of imprisoned journalists and prisoners of conscience worldwide. Upon returning to Canada he joined the University of British Columbia as an adjunct professor.