Dr Omar Al-Ubaydli is the Director of Research at Derasat, Bahrain. He is also an affiliated associate professor of economics at George Mason University; an affiliated senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center; and adjunct visiting professor at the King Fahad University of Petroleum and Minerals; a non-resident fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington; and a non-resident fellow at Trends, UAE. His research interests include political economy, experimental economics, and the economics of the GCC countries. Al-Ubaydli previously served as a member of the Commonwealth of Virginia’s Joint Advisory Board of Economists and a Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. He regularly publishes his research in international peer-reviewed academic journals, and his mainstream media articles appear in Arabic and English-language newspapers and blogs such as AlHayat, The National, Forbes Opinion, and US News. Al-Ubaydli earned his BA in economics from the University of Cambridge, and his MA and PhD in economics from the University of Chicago.

[Moderator] Dr Clemens Chay is a research fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Middle East Institute. His research focuses on the history and politics of the Gulf states, with a particular emphasis on Kuwait, Oman and Qatar. At MEI he spearheads a public education series entitled “Bridging the Gulf”. His recent academic publications include a chapter that examines Kuwait’s parliamentary politics in The Routledge Handbook of Persian Gulf Politics (2020), a chapter in the edited volume Informal Politics in the Middle East (Hurst, 2021), and a study appearing in the Journal of Arabian Studies, titled “The Dīwāniyya Tradition in Modern Kuwait: An Interlinked Space and Practice.” His commentaries also feature across different outlets, including ISPI, KFCRIS, and AGSIW. He is currently working on a book project related to Kuwait’s diwaniyas (affectionately known as diwawin, and more widely known as majalis outside Kuwait), the reception rooms for informal meetings that have implications for society, politics and diplomacy.

Prior to joining MEI, Dr Chay was the Al-Sabah fellow at Durham University, where he taught and completed his PhD in Middle Eastern and Islamic studies, and where he also received an MSc in defence, development and diplomacy. He is also a Sciences Po Paris alumnus, having read his BA at the Menton campus.