Profile: Dr Noel Brehony, CMG, Chair

After completing a PhD on Libya he spent two years on post-doctoral research on the West Bank before joining the Foreign and Commonwealth Office where he worked mainly on the Middle East with postings to Kuwait, Yemen, Jordan and Egypt. He was then Director of Middle East Affairs at Rolls-Royce plc. He has been chairman of the Middle East Association. He was President of the British Society for Middle East Studies 2000-2006 and chairman of the Council for British Research in the Levant 2002-2008. He is on the advisory board of the London Middle East Institute at SOAS, where he was also a Research Associate 2008-2011.

He is chairman of the British Yemeni Society and the Anglo-Jordanian Society. He is council member for the British Foundation for the Study of Arabia and a trustee of the Altajir Foundation. Dr Brehony co-edited “British-Egyptian Relations from Suez to the Present Day” published 2007. His book on the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, Yemen Divided: the story of a failed state in South Arabia was published in March 2011.