Naomi Hossain was educated at Oxford and the London School of Economics before being employed as a research officer at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, where she also took her DPhil. She is now a Senior Research Fellow at the Research and Evaluation Division of BRAC in Bangladesh, where she is coordinating a programme of research into how village governance arrangements affect the poorest. Her other research interests include the politics of poverty and social policy and the sociology of aid and aid relations.