A scholar and author focusing on politics, religion, and security studies in the West and the Arab world, Dr H.A. Hellyer is a Senior Associate Fellow in International Security Studies at the Royal United Services Institute in London and at the RH Centre for the Middle East at the Atlantic Council in DC. Following the 2005 London bombings, he was appointed as Deputy Convenor of theUK Government’s Taskforce on tackling radicalisation, and served as the Foreign & Commonwealth Office’s first Economic and Social Research Council Fellow as part of the ‘Islam’ & ‘Counter-Terrorism’ teams. Dr Hellyer was also appointed Senior Fellow in Islamic Studies at Cambridge Muslim College and adjunct full Professor at the Centre for Advanced Studies on Islam, Science and Civilisation in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. A public intellectual in and on both theWest and the Arab world, Dr Hellyer's insights on current events in the ArabWorld, Europe, and Muslim communities worldwide are regularly sought by the international media networks such as CNN, BBC and Al-Jazeera, with several hundred op-eds for publications like the Washington Post, Foreign Policy, the New York Times, the Guardian, Mada Masr, the Globe and Mail, the National, al-Jazeera and Daily News Egypt.

Prior to joining the Council, Dr Hellyer was a nonresident Fellow at theCentre for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution in DC and ResearchAssociate at the JFK School of Government at Harvard University. He is currently on the steering committee for a multi-year EU-funded project on “Radicalisation, Secularism and the Governance of Religion", which brings togetherEuropean, North African, and Asian perspectives with a consortium of a dozen or so universities and think-tanks. He previously served as the first Arab world-based Senior Practice Consultant at the Gallup Organisation, where he analysed public opinion data in a variety of countries in the Arab world and the West.

An academic as well as an analyst, Dr Hellyer has had scholarly attachments at noted institutions including the University of Warwick, where he was a Senior Research Fellow, the American University in Cairo, and the Oxford Centre forIslamic Studies of the University of Oxford, where he authored several books and monographs & has contributed more than 25 book chapters and journal articles to various presses. Recent books and monographs include “Muslims of Europe: the ‘Other’ Europeans” for Edinburgh University Press, “Engagement with the Muslim Community & Counter-Terrorism: British Lessons for the West”for Brookings Institution Press and “A Revolution Undone: Egypt’s Road Beyond Revolt” for Oxford University Press and Hurst& Company. His latest book, "A Sublime Path" examines the Sufi order of the Meccan polymath,Sayyid Muhammad bin 'Alawi al-Maliki, co-written with two of al-Maliki's most noted students. In 2018, Dr Hellyer also edited the volume, “The Islamic Tradition and the Human Rights Discourse”, published by the Atlantic Council.

Dr Hellyer’s degree in law was read at the University of Sheffield School ofLaw, with an advanced degree in international political economy at theUniversity of Sheffield’s Department of Politics. He completed a multidisciplinary PhD at the University of Warwick as an Economic and SocialResearch Council scholar, and researched Islamic thought with traditionally trained specialists in the UK, Egypt, Malaysia and South Africa.