His career has spanned the academic and think-tank world as a faculty member in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington; Senior Fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School; and Senior Fellow at Brookings and Director of the Brookings Doha Center. His involvement with public policy includes working at the Middle East Department at the International Monetary Fund; the Middle East and North Africa region of the World Bank; and the UN Millennium Project.

 

He has a PhD in economics from Harvard University. His research has focused on the economic development and political economy of policy reform in the Middle East. He has contributed more than 80 articles, chapters, and reports, and co-edited several volumes including most recently Public Sector Reform in the Middle East and North Africa: Lessons of Experience for a Region in Transition (Brookings Institution Press, 2020); The Gulf Cooperation Council at Forty: Risk and Opportunity in a Changing World (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022); and The Middle East's Fragile Reset: Actors, Battlegrounds, and (Dis)order (Middle East Council on Global Affairs, 2023).