Mishal Husain
Mishal Husain joins Breakfast from BBC World, where she presented the evening news programmes, including those aimed at the prime-time TV audience in the US and Canada.
Working on Breakfast is quite a change of agenda, she says:
On this programme you can be talking about terrorism one moment and football the next, with the odd showbiz personality thrown in.
"It's a challenge but it also means there's never a dull moment."
Mishal has been known to BBC World viewers abroad since she started presenting in 2000 - first specialising in the business news and moving to the main news programmes shortly after September 11th 2001.
As a business presenter she worked on 'World Business Report' and also launched the BBC's 'Asia Business Report' programme, based in Singapore.
The international theme continued, with a year's stint in Washington as a BBC correspondent for the Six O'Clock News.
She was on air for the White House announcement in March 2003 that the war in Iraq had begun:
"It was quite a surreal moment: we had spent months debating Iraq and what the US would do, and in that instant, everything changed."
Hard talk
Since returning to London, Mishal has also appeared on BBC One's Real Story and as the presenter of the recently-launched 'Hardtalk Extra' - an in-depth interview programme focusing on the arts world.
"I've interviewed people like George Benson, Ben Elton and the guitarist Paco Pena.
"Ben Elton wasn't an easy interview - he was very short of time and I kept thinking he was going to take off his mike and push off to where his cast were rehearsing next door!"
Mishal was born in the UK but grew up in the United Arab Emirates. Her family are from Pakistan and she maintains close links - in fact her first experience of journalism, at the age of 18, was with a newspaper there.
Later, she read Law at Cambridge University and then completed a Master's degree in International and Comparative Law at the European University Institute in Florence.
"That legal knowledge still comes in handy today - I specialised in human rights which often come up in the news these days."
Mishal is married and lives in West London.
