Queen Noor of Jordan

Queen Noor's international work focuses on environmental issues and the connection to human security with emphasis on water and ocean health. At the 2017 Our Ocean Conference, Her Majesty delivered a keynote address on the link between climate change and ocean health with human security. Her Majesty is Patron of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, Founding and Emeritus President of BirdLife International, Trustee Emeritus of Conservation International, and an Ocean Elder. She was also chair of King Hussein Foundation International, a US non-profit 501(c)(3) which, since 2001, has awarded the King Hussein Leadership Prize.She is the president of the international board, the governing board of international movement for the UWC movement.

Queen Noor was born as Lisa Najeeb Halaby in Washington, D.C. She is the daughter of Najeeb Halaby, (1915–2003) and Doris Carlquist (1918–2015). Her father was a Navy experimental test pilot, an airline executive, and government official. He served as United States Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Truman administration, before being appointed by John F. Kennedy to head the Federal Aviation Administration. Najeeb Halaby also had a private-sector career, serving as CEO of Pan American World Airways from 1969 to 1972. The Halabys had two children following Lisa; a son, Christian, and a younger daughter, Alexa. They divorced in 1977. Her mother, Doris, was of Swedish descent and died on December 25, 2015 age 97.

She is the longest-standing member of the Board of Commissioners of the International Commission on Missing Persons. As of 2011, she is president of the United World Colleges movement and an advocate of the anti-nuclear weapons proliferation campaign Global Zero. In 2015, Queen Noor received Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson Award for her public service.

According to research done in 2010 for the PBS series Faces of America by Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., of Harvard University, her great-grandfather, Elias Halaby, came to New York around 1891, one of the earliest Lebanese immigrants to the United States. He was a Christian as well as having been a provincial treasurer (magistrate) in the Ottoman Empire and his family had origins in Zahle and Beirut as stated before by his father Najeeb Halaby in his autobiography "Crosswinds: an Airman's Memoir". He left Ottoman Syria with his two eldest sons. His wife, Almas Mallouk, and their remaining children joined him in the United States in 1894. He died three years later, leaving his teenage sons, Habib, and Najeeb (her paternal grandfather), to run his import business. Najeeb moved to Dallas around 1910 and fully assimilated into American society.

King Hussein died on February 7, 1999 from lymphatic cancer. After his death, his first-born son, Abdullah II, became king and Hamzah became crown prince. In 2004, Prince Hamzah was unexpectedly stripped of his status as heir designate. On July 2, 2009, Abdullah named his eldest son as heir-apparent to the throne, thereby ending the previous five years' speculation over his successor.

Queen Noor founded the King Hussein Foundation (KHF) in 1979. It includes the Noor Al Hussein Foundation and eight specialized development institutions: the Jubilee Institute, the Information and Research Center, the National Music Conservatory, the National Center for Culture and Arts and the Institute for Family Health, the Community Development Program, Tamweelcom the Jordan Micro Credit Company and the Islamic microfinance company, Ethmar. She is the Honorary Chairperson of JOrchestra. In addition, Queen Noor launched a youth initiative, the International Arab Youth Congress, in 1980.

Halaby wed King Hussein on June 15, 1978 in Amman, becoming Queen of Jordan.

After she graduated from Princeton, Halaby moved to Australia, where she worked for a firm that specialized in planning new towns, with a burgeoning interest in the Middle East, which because of Halaby's Syrian roots had special appeal. After a year, in 1975, she accepted a job offer from Llewelyn Davies, a British architectural and planning firm, which had been employed to design a model capital city center in Tehran, Iran. When increasing political instability forced the company to relocate to the UK, she traveled to the Arab world and decided to apply to Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism while taking a temporary aviation facility research job in Amman. Eventually, she left Arab Air and accepted a job with Alia Airlines to become Director of Facilities Planning and Design. Halaby and the king became friends while he was still mourning the death of his wife. Their friendship evolved and the couple became engaged in 1978.

Halaby attended schools in New York and California before entering National Cathedral School from fourth to eighth grade. She attended the Chapin School in New York City for two years, and then went on to graduate from Concord Academy, a high school in Concord, Massachusetts. She entered Princeton University with its first coeducational freshman class and received a BA in architecture and urban planning in 1974. At Princeton, she was also a member of the school's first women's ice hockey team.

Noor Al-Hussein (Arabic: نور الحسين ‎; born Lisa Najeeb Halaby on August 23, 1951) is the Queen Dowager of Jordan as the widow of King Hussein. She was his fourth spouse and Queen Consort between their marriage in 1978 and his death in 1999.

Noor's paternal grandfather, Najeeb Elias Halaby, a Lebanese immigrant who emigrated from Zahle, Lebanon, was a petroleum broker, according to 1920 Census records. Merchant Stanley Marcus, however, recalled that in the mid-1920s, Halaby opened Halaby Galleries, a rug boutique and interior-decorating shop, at Neiman Marcus in Dallas, Texas, and ran it with his Texas-born wife, Laura Wilkins (1889–1987, later Mrs. Urban B. Koen). Najeeb Halaby died shortly afterward, and his estate was unable to continue the new enterprise.