Professor Naomi Hossain is a political sociologist with degrees in philosophy, politics, economics, social anthropology and development studies from the University of Oxford, London School of Economics and Political Science, and the University of Sussex.

She is part-Bangladeshi and part-Irish, and has lived and worked in Bangladesh, at the world’s largest NGO, BRAC; in Indonesia and the UK, while at the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University; and in the US, at the Accountability Research Center at American University in Washington DC.