Mehdi Yahyanejad is a research scientist at the University of Southern California. He is currently working on developing tools and resources that will facilitate the exchange of digital content among individuals with limited no or Internet access. Yahyanejad is also the founder of Balatarin.com, the most popular user-generated news website in Persian. Yahyanejad was a bronze medal winner in the 1993 International Physics Olympiad as a high school student. He earned a B.S. at Sharif University in Tehran and a Ph.D. degree from MIT, and was a postdoctoral fellow in Bioinformatics at Stanford University.