Abdulaziz bin Mohieddin Khoja

Abdulaziz bin Mohieddin Khoja (MSc Chemistry, 1967; PhD Chemistry, 1970) was born in Mecca in 1940, obtaining a BSc from King Saud University.

He came to the UK to study at Birmingham, gaining his Masters in 1967, and went on to complete his PhD in Organic Chemistry in 1970.

He returned to Saudi Arabia as Dean of the Faculty of Education in Mecca in 1979, before beginning his civil service career as the undersecretary for information affairs at the Ministry of Information from 1984 to 1991.

He then served as Ambassador to various countries, including Turkey (1991), Russia and Morocco. As Ambassador to Lebanon from 2004 to 2009, he was responsible for communicating King Abdullah's foreign policy towards Lebanon, which was highly intense and seen as an interventionist approach.

On 14 February 2009, Khoja was appointed minister of culture and information as part of King Abdullah's reform initiatives. He became Saudi Arabia’s Ambassador in Morocco in 2016.