Suleiman Halasah is one of the first initiators and founders of Desert Matters.
He was leading and mentoring the first groups of Jordanian tourism experts towards cooperation with Israeli tourist experts from the Arava communities, and conducted a few mutual tourism trainings for both Israelis and Jordanians.
In 2002, Suleiman Halasah graduated from the University of Jordan with a degree in electrical engineering and went on to work first as a teaching assistant for the University of Jordan’s Department of Computer Engineering and then as a control engineer for the Jordan Valley Authority on irrigation projects. Yet within a few years, Halasah came to realize the work wasn’t for him.
In 2006, Halasah joined the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies in Israel where he was part of the team that founded a photovoltaic solar field company called the Arava Power Company. He went on to found the environmental service consulting agency i.GREENs; serve as the acting associate director of the Arava Institute’s Center for Transboundary Water Management; and now
Suleiman co-directs the Jordan-Israel Center for Community, Environment, and Research (JICCER), which supports the well-being of natural and human systems of the Arava valley through cross-border community initiatives and research. Meanwhile, Halasah earned a Master of Science and a Ph.D. degree in Desert Studies from Ben-Gurion University in the Negev, Israel, currently Suleiman is a research associate at the Centre for International Studies at Oxford University, UK.