Nicolò Marchetti - the KAIS Chair coordinator - teaches Near eastern archaeology at the University of Bologna and has a long experience in archaeological research in Western Asia, notably in Syria, Palestine, Turkey and Iraq. As scientific director of several excavation projects at important sites therein, he gave equal significance to the investigation of ancient remains and their fruition by the public through the creation of archaeological parks. The latter, addressed to both local communities and tourists, are acting as meaningful elements for the cultural and economic development of the surrounding areas. These activities have been implemented also through his coordination of several concluded EU-sponsored cooperation projects such as ARCHAIA, WALADU and EDUU. He is the editor the scientific web platform OrientLab. He directs the excavations of Nineveh in Iraq and Karkemish in Turkey and coordinates the BANUU and KALAM projects.
Mohammed Al Khalid is a Research fellow at the KAIS Chair, Bologna University. He got his BA and MA degrees in Archaeology from the University of Aleppo in 2008, and got his PhD in 2013 with Paolo Matthiae at the Sapienza University of Rome with a dissertation on the funerary traditions in Syria during the 3rd millennium BC. In 2013-2015 and 2019-2022 he was a research fellow at Sapienza University of Rome and was responsible for the Ancient Near East laboratory supervising graduate students. In 2015 and 2017 he was a post-Doc fellow at the University of Bern in Switzerland. In 2018-2020 he collaborated with the University of Bologna within the EDUU and WALADU projects on the cultural heritage and archaeological education in Iraq, carrying out training courses for Iraqi researchers on the methodology and new techniques of archaeological research.