Too much research breaks somewhere: thin analysis, dull questions, findings nobody acts on. The result is always the same, time and money spent with nothing to show for it.
We started Strata to close that gap: research rigorous enough to trust and useful enough to act on. Headquartered in Abu Dhabi and Washington, DC, working across six regions.
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Dr. Roya Izadi is a policy advisor and applied researcher specializing in security-sector governance, civil-military relations, conflict analysis, and institutional reform. As Co-Founder and Managing Director, she leads from the firm's U.S. office while working across its U.S. and UAE operations. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the State University of New York at Binghamton.
Roya has advised international organizations, research institutions, security forces, and local partners on policy challenges spanning women's participation in peace operations, military reform, conflict risk, and the role of security institutions in political and economic life. She has worked with the Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance, UN Women, the Latin American Defense and Security Forum, and national partners in Cambodia, Uruguay, Jordan, Fiji, Bangladesh, and Senegal through the Measuring Opportunities for Women in Peace Operations initiative.
Her work combines institutional assessment, stakeholder engagement, field research, comparative analysis, and policy design. She has supported the Liberian military in developing an institutional action plan and has produced applied analysis on security forces for an Iranian policy institution. She has also contributed to three annual global conflict-risk reports.
For the Effective Peacebuilding Initiative, Roya developed intervention typologies, reviewed and mapped conflict definitions across major datasets, and helped design a framework for identifying and coding key conflict characteristics. She also worked alongside artificial-intelligence specialists to compare and integrate analytical outputs into a coherent research methodology.
Roya brings particular expertise in translating complex evidence into practical frameworks, policy recommendations, and implementation plans for decision-makers operating in sensitive political and security environments.
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Zinab Attai is an impact-evaluation and policy-research specialist with more than eight years of experience advising governments, international organizations, development agencies, and research institutions. As Co-Founder and Managing Director, she leads from the firm's UAE office while working across its UAE and U.S. operations. She holds an M.A. in Government from Cornell University and is completing a Ph.D. in comparative politics and methods at Cornell University.
Zinab specializes in designing evidence strategies that help clients assess what works, strengthen program delivery, and make better-informed policy and investment decisions. Her expertise includes impact evaluation, econometric analysis, randomized controlled trials, cost-effectiveness and value-for-money assessments, survey design, monitoring systems, and mixed-method research.
She has led complex, multi-country assignments from initial research design through field implementation, analysis, and policy reporting. Her experience includes nationally representative studies involving more than 17,000 participants, as well as institutional assessments in governance, security, social policy, peacekeeping, and international development.
Zinab has led or supported assignments for UN Women, the Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance, USAID, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, The Asia Foundation, and other international partners. Her work has included assessments of barriers to women's participation in military and police institutions, evaluations of anti-narcotics programming, justice-sector research, disability surveys, and studies of livelihoods, governance, and resilience in fragile and conflict-affected settings.
She is experienced in managing field operations under complex conditions, building practical monitoring and evaluation systems, and translating technical findings into clear recommendations for senior decision-makers. Zinab also founded the Afghanistan Open Data Initiative, which develops accessible, research-ready governance and administrative datasets.
We assemble project-specific teams from a vetted network of regional specialists, fieldwork partners, and technical advisers, built over years of work in the places we operate. That network includes local enumerators and field managers, subject-matter experts across our practice areas, translators, and data-collection partners who know the terrain, the language, and the people we need to reach.
It's how a two-person leadership team delivers work at the scale of a much larger firm, without the overhead, and without losing the direct involvement that keeps quality high.
In research, strata are the distinct subgroups within a population that tell very different stories if you look closely enough. Good research doesn't treat people as one undifferentiated mass. It goes deeper, separating out the communities, contexts, and experiences that look similar on the surface but mean something very different up close. We named the firm Strata because that's the kind of work we care about: getting beneath the headline number to understand what's actually going on.
