Robert Mason is a non-resident fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington and a fellow with the Sectarianism, Proxies and De-sectarianisation project at Lancaster University. Previously, he was an associate professor and director of the Middle East Studies Center at the American University in Cairo. He was also a visiting scholar in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, a visiting research fellow at the University of Oxford, and a visiting research fellow at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh. He specializes in Gulf politics and the international relations of the Middle East.

Mason has been involved in policy initiatives ranging from co-hosting the 14th Korea-Middle East Cooperation Forum in Seoul in November 2017 to convening an European Union-Middle East policy roundtable event in Cairo in May 2019. He has engaged in various policy-related events and presented his research at leading academic institutions. He is a regular commentator on regional and international affairs. His latest books include New Perspectives on Middle East Politics: Economy, Society and International Relations (Cairo: AUC Press, 2021), Reassessing Order and Disorder in the Middle East: Regional Imbalance or Disintegration? (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), and Egypt and the Gulf: A Renewed Regional Policy Alliance (Berlin: Gerlach Press, 2016). He holds a PhD in Middle East politics from the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter.