As of 2023, she is president of the United World Colleges movement and an advocate of the anti-nuclear weapons proliferation campaign Global Zero.

[4] Her father was raised a Christian Scientist[5] and was a Navy experimental test pilot, an airline executive, and government official.

[6] Noor's paternal grandfather was Najeeb Elias Halaby, a Syrian-Lebanese businessman born in Zahle, and whose parents hailed from Aleppo.

[11] 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 circa 1891, one of the earliest Syrian-Lebanese immigrants to the United States.

He died three years later, leaving his teenage sons, Habib, and Najeeb (her paternal grandfather), to run his import business.

[17] 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.

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.

[19] Queen Noor's international work focuses on environmental issues and the connection to human security with emphasis on water and ocean health.

[22][23][24] 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.

[23] Noor divides her time among Jordan, the US (Washington, D.C.) and the United Kingdom (in London and at her country residence, Buckhurst Park, near Winkfield in Berkshire).