APCI Chairman, Dr Khalid Koser

Previously Deputy Chair of the Advisory Panel on Country Information, Dr Khalid Koser was appointed Chair in February 2006, taking over the position from Professor Stephen Castles.

Khalid Koser is Fellow in Humanitarian Issues at the Brookings Institution and Deputy-Director of the Brookings-Bern Project on Internal Displacement. Before this he was Senior Policy Analyst at the Global Commission on International Migration.

He studied Geography at the University of Cambridge, and received his PhD in Geography from University College London.

Dr Koser has been Research Fellow at the European Research Centre on Migration and Ethnic Relations (ERCOMER) and at the Sussex Centre for Migration Research (SCMR) and lecturer in Human Geography at University College London.

His research has focused on forced migration, with a particular interest in asylum policies and practice, refugee repatriation and migrant smuggling. He has extensive fieldwork experience in Southern Africa and the Horn of Africa, the Balkans and Afghanistan and Pakistan.

He has conducted research and written reports for the UK Home Office, ICMPD, ILO, IOM and the European Commission.  From 2002-06 he was a member of the Consultative Committee of the Information Centre on Asylum and Refugees (ICAR), and from 2004-06 was Vice-President of the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration (IASFM).

He has published widely on migration, refugee and asylum issues. His most recent book, A Very Short Introduction to International Migration, will be published by Oxford University Press in Spring 2007.