Maurice Said completed his PhD is Socio-cultural Anthropology at the University of Durham (2015), where he conducted fieldwork on the longer term impacts of post-tsunami recovery and development in coastal villages in southern Sri Lanka.

Prior to joining the department at Malta he held teaching posts at the University of Bath and Durham University, where he was also Director of the postgraduate taught programme. He has worked as a researcher and consultant on numerous humanitarian and development projects in the EU, South Asia and North Africa. He was lead researcher and WP leader on various EU projects, including the EU FP7 project FORTRESS (Foresight tools for responding to cascading effects in a crisis) and a lead researcher on the Horizon 2020 DANTE project (Detecting and analysing terrorist-related online contents and financing activities). He has also been lead researcher on numerous humanitarian and development projects working with: the GDPC (Global Disaster Preparedness Centre), ADPC (Asian Disaster Preparedness Centre), various Red Cross National Societies, UKCDS (UK Collaborative on Development Research), among others.

His areas of research and teaching include international development and humanitarian action, political factionalism, post-disaster recovery, the social analysis of complex emergencies, kinship, suicide and self-harm, exoticisation and counter-exoticisation, applied anthropology and development brokerage. More recently, he has conducted research into the extreme-right in Malta.