Khalid Azim is the director of the MENA Futures Lab at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East. The Lab serves as a collaborative hub and intellectual engine, driving innovation, entrepreneurship, private-sector engagement, and the creation of transformative knowledge capital and connectivity across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

Azim brings to the role a distinguished career spanning finance, academia, public service, and nonprofit leadership. He has led nonprofit efforts advancing financial and professional engagement across the MENA region, worked as a global capital markets banker at Morgan Stanley in New York and Hong Kong, and began his career as a US Navy officer during the First Gulf War, serving on a fast-attack, nuclear-powered submarine. A former White House Fellow and life member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Azim is also an adjunct professor at Columbia University, where he teaches courses on leadership, ethics, and communications.

His prior board service includes the executive committee of ABANA and the board of trustees of the Cathedral School of St. John the Divine. He holds a BA in English from Pitzer College (Claremont Colleges) and an MBA from the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia.