The Mahbub ul Haq Research Centre (MHRC) is the flagship centre of social science research at LUMS. It supports interdisciplinary research, scholarship and teaching on issues of human development, social exclusion and inequality across South Asia. Its vision is to co-construct knowledge on critical challenges with a community of scholars, students, practitioners and social actors to bring about transformative change for an inclusive and equitable society.
The Centre was founded in 1995 by Dr. Mahbub ul Haq, the pioneer of the Human Development Index and Human Development Reports at the UNDP. It was established as a research institute to promote human development in South Asia and began the tradition of producing the Human Development in South Asia Reports. It became part of the Lahore University of Management Sciences on 1st July 2016.
MHRC Strategic Core Team
Executive Director, Mahbub Ul Haq Research Centre
Ali Cheema
Director
Ali Cheema serves as the Director of the Mahbub Ul Haq Research centre, and is an Associate Professor of Economics at the Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS. Cheema is also a Senior Research Fellow at IDEAS Pakistan, co-founder of the centre for Economic Research in Pakistan (CERP), and a co-lead academic of the International Growth centre’s Pakistan programme. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex and was the Chair of the Economics Department at LUMS from 2004-2010. He was also a founding member of the Stockholm Challenge Award winning portal, Relief Information System for Earthquakes, Pakistan (RISEPAK).
His areas of research include economic development with a focus on human capital, inclusion and economic mobility, gender, public economics, comparative politics, economic history, and the economics of crime. His research combines extensive mixed-methods fieldwork, historical archival research, rigorous empirical analysis, and theory to offer insights into how political economy and historical foundations shape economic and political development. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Cambridge, an MPhil in Economics and Politics from Cambridge, a BA (Hons.) in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) from Oxford where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and a BA in Mathematics and Statistics from Government College, Lahore. He was a visiting Fulbright and SAI Scholar at Harvard Kennedy School from 2010-11.
Dr. Ali Cheema is part of the board of directors for the State Bank of Pakistan since July 2022.
cheema@lums.edu.pk
Director Research, Mahbub Ul Haq Research Centre
Soufia Siddiqi
Director Research
Soufia’s work is anchored in broad-spectrum qualitative research methods that can help explain the political economy of educational experience in the Pakistani context. Specifically, she investigates how system design engenders inefficiencies and frictions that contribute to contested notions of identity in sites of learning, and their implications for effective service delivery.
This theme informs two of her current projects. The first is a qualitative investigation she leads into Pakistani public school teacher motivation and identity as part of the Research on Improving Systems of Education (RISE) Programme’s Political Economy component housed at the University of Pennsylvania. The second is a process tracing exploration she co-leads into how delivery models are constructed and enacted by elite public education decision-makers as part of the Pakistan team for Lahore-based think tank IDEAS and its global partners, The Education Commission and the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford.
Previously, Soufia was Technical Advisor to the School Education Department, Punjab where she worked on key policy initiatives with the government, including developing a 5-year roadmap for the province’s most urgent reform needs. This project payed special attention to the need for a coherent learning outcomes dataset as well as governance strategies for whole-system improvement. She was also a member of the Punjab Examination Commission, where she led the Technical Committee for the province’s 2019 Assessment Policy Framework and, between 2015 and 2018, a research advisor to Alif Ailaan, Pakistan’s first education advocacy campaign.
Dr Siddiqi was Pakistan’s 2010 Rhodes Scholar to the University of Oxford, where she read for a DPhil Education (2017) and MSc Comparative and International Education (2011) at St. Anne’s College. Her first degree is in Economics from Government College University Lahore.
soufia.siddiqi@lums.edu.pk
Associate Director, Mahbub Ul Haq Research Centre
Farah Said
Associate Director, Mahbub Ul Haq Research Centre
Farah Said is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS.
In her work, Dr. Said uses field and lab experiments to study the dynamics of poverty and gender in LMICs. Her research investigates how men and women make decisions in the household; and factors that influence labor force participation, learning outcomes, and demand for low-cost energy and microfinance products among low-income households.
Previously, she has worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Faculty of Finance and Economics, University of Goettingen, a Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in Economics and Business (CREB), and an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Lahore School of Economics. Dr. Said has a Ph.D. in Economics from Lahore School of Economics, an MSc. in Financial Economics from the University of Oxford, and a BSc (Hons.) in Economics from the Lahore University of Management Sciences.
farah_said@lums.edu.pk
MHRC Staff
Research Manager, Mahbub ul Haq Research Centre
Momina Idrees
Research Manager
Momina Idrees is the Research Coordinator at Mahbub-ul-Haq Research Centre. Previously she has occupied roles in the development sector as Research Associate, Fieldworker, and Data Analyst. She has worked with the government on improving the status and welfare of women in Punjab and informing policy making at the Punjab Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW) and the Chief Minister’s Special Monitoring Unit (SMU). In the private sector, she has taken up different research and program-implementation roles in the areas of education and curriculum reform, public procurement, and public goods provision. She has helped design curriculum and trained and assessed primary level teachers, as well as been a part of research experiments at Centre for Economic Research Pakistan (CERP) and the International Growth Centre (IGC). She is committed to working for interdisciplinary research in Pakistan and her areas of interest include gender and urban spaces, the divide between public and private education and governance.
She completed her graduate degree in Development Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and has an undergraduate degree in Economics from LUMS.
momina.idrees@lums.edu.pk
Lead Research Assistant, Mahbub ul Haq Research Centre
Rida Fatima
Lead Research Assistant, Human Development Report
Rida Fatima is a Research Assistant at the Mahbub ul Haq Research Centre working on the Human Development Report. Additionally, Rida Fatima assists the IDEAS Research Team, currently working on the Women’s Voting Project for the Governance Cluster. She has a bachelor’s in Political Science and Economics from the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). Her research interests include focussing on the intersectionality between gender and development and its policy outcomes. She plans on pursuing a Master’s in Public Policy.
rida.fatima@lums.edu.pk
Accounts and Admin Officer, Mahbub ul Haq Research Centre
Tanveer Ahmed
Accounts and Admin Officer
Tanveer Ahmed is working as an Admin and Accounts Officer at the Mahbub ul Haq Research Centre, LUMS. He has over fourteen years of experience in the field of finance,accounts and administration. He completed his MBA in Finance from the University of the Arid Agriculture Rawalpindi.
tanveer.ahmed@lums.edu.pk-
As fellows of the MHRC, academics, researchers and area experts come together to explore issues of human development, social exclusion, and inequality across South Asia. Through their research, the fellows play an integral role in working towards the Centre’s goal of a more equitable and inclusive society.
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Mahbub ul Haq Research Centre Fellow
burki@lums.edu.pk
Abid A. Burki
Professor
Dr. Abid Aman Burki is a Mahbub ul Haq Research Centre fellow who served as Professor at the Economics Department at LUMS until 2020. From 2003 to 2010, Dr. Burki was Director of the Centre for Management and Economic Research (CMER) at LUMS. Prior to joining LUMS, he has been a Professor (1999-2002) and Head of Economics Department (2000 – 2002) at the Quaid-i-Azam University where he has held other academic positions since 1985. He has also taught at the Kansas State University and the BZ University.
His main current research areas are in technical efficiency and productivity, dairy sector, health sector, agriculture sector, industrial sector, inequality and poverty. He has authored or co-authored more than 100 articles, book chapters and professional reports. His academic research has appeared in World Development, Energy Economics, Applied Economics, Journal of Economics & Business, Land Use Policy, Journal of Development Effectiveness, Economics Bulletin, Pakistan Development Review and other journals.
He has received several research grants and has been a consultant to the Government of Pakistan, UNICEF, UNESCO, World Bank, JICA, IFPRI, Nestle Pakistan, Tetra Pak Pakistan, Indus Motor Company, GIZ, Oxfam, IGC, among others.
He holds a PhD degree in Economics from Kansas State University and is the recipient of the 2001 President of Pakistan’s academic distinction award Izaz-i-Fazeelat.
burki@lums.edu.pk
Associate Professor, The School of International Service, American University
auerbach.adam@gmail.com
Adam Auerbach
Associate Professor, The School of International Service, American University
Adam Auerbach is an associate professor in the School of International Service at American University. His research focuses on local governance, urban politics, and the political economy of development, with a regional focus on South Asia and India in particular. Auerbach’s first book, Demanding Development: The Politics of Public Goods Provision in India’s Urban Slums (Cambridge University Press, 2020), accounts for the uneven success of India’s slum residents in demanding and securing essential public services from the state. The project draws on more than two years of ethnographic fieldwork and survey research in the north Indian cities of Bhopal and Jaipur. Demanding Development won the 2021 Dennis Judd Best Book Award from the Urban and Local Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. Auerbach’s research on urban politics and development in India also appears in the American Journal of Political Science, American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, Perspectives on Politics, World Development, and World Politics, among other journals.
auerbach.adam@gmail.com
Assistant Professor, Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences
agha.akram@lums.edu.pk
Agha Ali Akram
Assistant Professor
Dr. Agha Ali Akram is an Assistant Professor in the Department of conomics at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. He received is Doctorate in Environmental Economics (2014) and Masters in Environmental Management (2008) from Yale University. Prior to joining LUMS, he was a Visiting Fellow at Yale University (2016-2017) and a Postdoctoral Fellow at Evidence Action (2014 – 2016), where his research delved into the impact of seasonal income support programs n mitigating hunger risk in Bangladesh and the impact of innovative onditional cash transfer mechanisms on improving vaccination rates in Pakistan
Ali’s research explores themes in public health, including drinking water quality, mental health, nutrition and family planning. His work uses field experiments to test innovations in these research areas, both in Pakistan and outside. His portfolio currently includes an experiment to improve youth mental health in Sierra Leone; field experiments to improve child nutrition and access to improved drinking water quality in Karachi, Pakistan; and a field experiment to improve contraceptive uptake in Lahore, Pakistan.
Ali is an affiliated fellow with Interactive Research and Development (IRD), the Institute for Development and Economics Alternatives (IDEAS), nd the Consortium for Development Policy Research (CDPR). He has been awarded several research grants including National Science of Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant for Research in Economics (2012), Yale Institute of Biospheric Grant (2012), GiveWell (2014), Shahid Hussain Foundation grant (2018), LUMS Faculty Imitative Fund (2018) and most recently the World Bank’s Strategic Impact Evaluation Fund (SIEF) grant. He is also a John F. Enders Fellow (2012), Tropical Resource Institute Fellow (2010), Fulbright Scholar (2006) and a Leland Burt Scholar (2006).
agha.akram@lums.edu.pk
Doctoral Candidate, Cornell University
aa2378@cornell.edu
Ali Abbas
Doctoral Candidate
Ali Abbas is a doctoral candidate in Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University. His professional work includes working with the governments of Punjab and KP on the design of property taxation. Moreover, Ali has previously been associated with organizations such as the World Bank, the Center for Economic Research in Pakistan, and the Brookings Institution.
Ali’s areas of interest lie in public finance and development economics. His research focuses on taxpayer responses to tax policy, and the efficiency, distributional, and revenue outcomes of different income and property tax regimes, both in the United States and in developing country settings.
Before enrolling at Cornell, Ali attended the public policy program at the University of Minnesota as a Fulbright scholar.
aa2378@cornell.edu
Provost, Habib University, Karachi, Pakistan
anjum.altaf@lums.edu.pk
Anjum Altaf
Provost
Dr. Anjum Altaf obtained a MA in Economics and a PhD in Engineering-Economic Systems both from Stanford University. He was affiliated with the Applied Economics Research Center at the University of Karachi and with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the departments of City and Regional Planning and Environment and Public Health. After working at the World Bank in the Research department and the East Asia Urban Development programme with a focus on China and Vietnam, he joined LUMS as Professor of Economics and Dean of the School of Humanities, Social Sciences and Law. He was subsequently Vice-President and Provost at the newly established Habib University in Karachi.
anjum.altaf@lums.edu.pk
Public Policy Professional
asad.ejazb@gmail.com
Asad Ejaz Butt
Public Policy Professional
Asad Ejaz Butt is a public policy professional trained in Economics and International Development Studies with over 10 years’ experience in areas of public financial management reforms such as strategic planning & budgeting, expenditure reviews, development planning at local and subnational levels, fiscal transfer systems, cash and debt management strategies and macro-fiscal policies and regulations. His career started with ICF International where he modelled energy efficiency products for ICF’s demand-side management programs.
He has conducted several value-for-money (VfM) based PFM reform projects for both bilateral and multilateral donors including the EU and USAID in the energy sectors of Africa, US, Canada and Pakistan. He has advised UNDP Pakistan and GIZ to foster private sector engagement in the SDGs agenda. He holds a Master’s degree with double majors in Economics and International Development Studies from the University of Guelph, Canada prior to which he completed his undergraduate studies in Economics at York University, Canada.
asad.ejazb@gmail.com
Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS
ayeshaali@lums.edu.pk
Ayesha Ali
Assistant Professor
Dr. Ayesha Ali is an Assistant Professor in Economics at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. She does research in applied microeconomics with a focus on topics in energy economics and information economics.
Her research makes use of large administrative data sets, field data collection, and rigorous empirical analysis to answer policy relevant questions. Her current research examines the effect of electricity outages on household welfare, the effectiveness of policies to control electricity theft, understanding and countering misinformation on social media among low digital literacy populations, competition and news media quality, and the economic consequences of internet censorship. She completed her PhD in Economics from the University of Toronto, Canada in 2016.
ayeshaali@lums.edu.pk
Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics and Dean of Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences , ITU
fahd.ali@itu.edu.pk
Fahd Ali
Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics and Dean of Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences , ITU
Dr. Fahd Ali is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics and Dean of Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences, ITU. His research interests lie in macroeconomics and economic history with political economy as a theme common to both.
Before joining the Information Technology University, he worked at Habib University as an Assistant Professor in their Social Development Policy programme. He was also one of the 14 founding faculty members of the university. His previous work experience includes working as a Research Assistant at Sustainable Development Policy Institute, Islamabad on programmes on renewable energy & clean fuels and sustainable livelihoods, and the environment.
Dr. Ali received his Ph.D. in Economics from The New School for Social Research, University of Utah. Additionally, he received the Frieda Wunderlich Memorial Award for Outstanding Dissertation by an International Student for his dissertation, Resource Mobilization through Taxation: The political economy of state and society in Pakistan. He was also one of thirteen recipients of the 2016 New School for Social Research Commencement Award.
fahd.ali@itu.edu.pk
Associate Professor, Mushtaq Ahmed Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences
bari@lums.edu.pk
Faisal Bari
Associate Professor
Dr. Faisal Bari is the Interim Dean of the Syed Ahsan Ali and Syed Maratib Ali School of Education (SoE) at LUMS. He is also an Associate Professor at SoE and the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. He has previously served as Head of the Economics Department from 2006-2008. Dr. Bari is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives (IDEAS). He is a former Executive Director and current research fellow at the Mahbubul Haq Research Centre (MHRC).His current teaching interests are in the areas of philosophy of education, inclusion, economics of education, game theory, microeconomics and industrial organization.
Dr. Bari has over twenty years of research experience in the field of industrial economics, development economics and education economics. Previously, he has worked as Deputy Country Director for Pakistan in the Central Eurasia Project and as an education economist for South Asia at the Open Society Foundation. He was a visiting faculty member at Yale University in 2000-2001. He has also consulted for various multilateral and bi-lateral agencies including the World Bank, United Nations Development Program (UNDP), Department of International Development (DFID) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB).
He writes a fortnightly column for the English Daily The Dawn.
Dr. Bari obtained a Doctorate from McGill University and a Master’s Degree (Philosophy) from the University of Punjab. He has two Bachelors’ degrees, one from University of Oxford and another from Government College, Lahore. Dr. Bari was the recipient of the 1988 Rhodes Scholarship for Pakistan.
bari@lums.edu.pk
Assistant Professor at the Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS
farah.ali@lums.edu.pk
Farah Hasan Ali
Assistant Professor at the Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS
Farah Hasan Ali is an Assistant Professor at the Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS. Dr. Ali’s areas of interest include the life and works of Harold Pinter, Theatre of the Absurd, and Twentieth-Century British Theatre, especially the Post-War period.
Dr. Ali is interested in issues pertaining to identity politics in different categories. Specifically, in the treatment and representation of the individual identity in public and private spheres, therefore concepts such as totalitarian regimes, conformity, oppression, and freedom of speech are key components of her research. Additionally, Dr. Ali is interested in women’s and gender representation in Islam, World Literature, and other social contexts.
Dr. Ali’s interest in Harold Pinter’s plays and writing, resulted in a recent book, Eroding the Language of Freedom: Identity Predicament in Selected Works of Harold Pinter (Routledge, 2018). Moreover, she is working on exploring the connections between Pinter’s works and other political and social events across the world. The representation of the female characters in Harold Pinter’s dramas in particular and theatre, in general, is one of her major interests too.
Dr. Ali’s postdoctoral research at the University of Leeds (2016-17), resulted in a journal article entitled, ‘Where Should the Birds Fly After the Last Sky? Images and Voices of Women of the Iraqi Diaspora in the United Kingdom’ (Diaspora Studies, 2018).In her second postdoctoral project, at the University of Hull (2017-19), she studied the challenges faced by Arabic women living in the UK.
farah.ali@lums.edu.pk
Assistant Professor of Anthropology, LUMS
ghazal.asif@lums.edu.pk
Ghazal Asif
Assistant Professor of Anthropology, LUMS
Ghazal Asif is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at LUMS. Her research and teaching focus on postcolonial regimes of legality and governance; domesticity, kinship, and gender; and everyday life, memory, and identity in multi-ethnic and multi-religious societies. Using in-depth ethnographic and archival methods, Ghazal’s research examines how the Hindu religious minority in Sindh navigates the contemporary regulation of difference and identity in a modern Muslim polity. She focuses on everyday practices of political claim-making and the management of domestic relations by Hindu women.
Ghazal holds a doctoral degree in Cultural Anthropology from Johns Hopkins University. Her dissertation research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the American Institute of Pakistan Studies; and received the Honorable Mention for the 2021 S.S Pirzada Dissertation Prize in Pakistan Studies.
ghazal.asif@lums.edu.pk
Professor, University of Texas, US.
asdar@lums.edu.pk
Kamran Asdar Ali
Professor
Dr. Kamran Asdar Ali is a professor of Anthropology, Middle East Studies and Asian Studies at the University of Texas, Austin. He served as Dean of the Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences (MGSHSS) at LUMS from 2017-2020. He has previously taught at the University of Rochester (NY), has been a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (1998-99), ISIM, University of Leiden (2005) and a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study Berlin (2010-2011).
He has conducted field research in Mexico, Egypt and in Pakistan on issues pertaining to health and gender, ethnicity, class politics, sexuality and popular culture. Among his other publications, he is also the author of Planning the Family in Egypt: New Bodies, New Selves (2002) and the co-editor of Gendering Urban Space in the Middle East, South Asia and Africa (2008), Comparing Cities: Middle East and South Asia (2009) and Gender, Politics, and Performance in South Asia (2015). His most recent book is Communism in Pakistan: Politics and Class Activism 1947-1972 (2015).
asdar@lums.edu.pk
Professor of Comparative Politics, University of Nottingham
Katharine.Adeney@nottingham.ac.uk
Katharine Adeney
Professor of Comparative Politics, University of Nottingham
Professor Katharine Adeney is a Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Nottingham. Katharine’s research focuses on federalism, ethnic diversity, elections, and democracy in South Asia, particularly India and Pakistan as well as the China Pakistan Economic Corridor. Her publications on Pakistan have been published by the Carnegie Endowment, Democratization, Publius, Asian Survey, Electoral Studies, and Ethnopolitics. She is also the author of Federalism and Ethnic Conflict Regulation in India and Pakistan (Palgrave 2007). Katharine received her Ph.D. from the London School of Economics, was a Junior Research Fellow at Balliol College Oxford, and an Associate Professor at the University of Sheffield before moving to the University of Nottingham.
Katharine.Adeney@nottingham.ac.uk
Assistant Professor at the Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS
laila@lums.edu.pk
Laila Bushra
Assistant Professor at the Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS
Laila Bushra is an Assistant Professor at the Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS.
Dr. Bushra’s interests are Social Theory, Historical Sociology, Urban History, and Political Economy. Her research deals with the multiple dimensions of Islamic fundamentalism in Pakistan in relation to the socio-economic and political changes associated with neoliberalism and globalization.
Her She has also been a postdoctoral fellow at the South Asia Institute at Harvard University. Her teaching covers the foundations and theoretical foundations of Sociology, religious fundamentalism, urban issues, and historical sociology.
Dr. Bushra received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Johns Hopkins University, USA.
laila@lums.edu.pk
Assistant Professor at the Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, LUMS
awais@lums.edu.pk
Mian Muhammad Awais
Assistant Professor at the Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, LUMS
Mian Muhammad Awais is an Assistant Professor at the Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, LUMS.
Prior to joining LUMS, Dr. Awais conducted European Union research and development projects for a UK-based SME. His Ph.D. work is related to the development of online models for the parametric estimation of solid fuel-fired industrial boilers. Dr. Awais has also conducted research work on a class of iterative methods pertinent to Krylov subspaces for optimization, such as the oblique projection and implicitly restarted model reduction methodologies.
Dr. Awais received his Ph.D. from Imperial College, University of London.
awais@lums.edu.pk
Assistant Professor, Columbia University
michael.best@columbia.edu
Michael Best
Assistant Professor
Dr. Michael Best is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Columbia University. Prior to this, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. Michael’s research focuses on tax evasion in developing countries and its implications for optimal tax policy and administration; the determinants of the effectiveness of public procurement in developing countries and the design of policies to improve it; and the effects of tax policy in developed countries and the design of optimal tax policies.
Michael holds a PhD from the LSE and an M.Phil from the University of Oxford.
michael.best@columbia.edu
Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, LUMS
hamad.alizai@lums.edu.pk
Muhammad Hamad Alizai
Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, LUMS
Muhammad Hamad Alizai is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, LUMS. He brings years of experience as a faculty, researcher, software engineer, and technical lead both in industrial and academic settings.
Dr. Alizai has authored a book and published more than 60 scientific papers while abroad and indigenously from Pakistan, several of them in top-flight ACM/IEEE journals and conferences (CoNEXT, SenSys, IPSN, BuildSys, LCTES, EWSN, TOSN, TECS, CCR). He regularly serves on the organizing and program committees of leading CS conferences such as MobiSys, SenSys, IPSN, BuildSys, SECON, IMWUT, and PerCom. He is a certified trainer for Instruction Skills Workshop and regularly conducts pedagogical workshops for faculty at LUMS.
Dr. Alizai has received the Vice Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence (2022), and Georg Forster Research Fellowship Award (2021-22), and has been the Best Paper Award candidate at ACM EWSN (2020).
hamad.alizai@lums.edu.pk
Associate Professor at Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, LUMS.
naveedarshad@lums.edu.pk
Naveed Arshad
Associate Professor and Director of the National Center in Big Data and Cloud Computing (NCBC) at Lahore University of Management Sciences
Dr. Naveed Arshad is presently an Associate Professor and Director of the National Center in Big Data and Cloud Computing (NCBC) at Lahore University of Management Sciences. He is also the Director of Energy Informatics Group (EIG) and Co-Founder of LUMS Energy Institute.
Dr. Arshad played a key role in formulating the first National Electric Vehicle Policy of Pakistan in collaboration with the Ministry of Climate Change and the Ministry of Industries and Production. Using energy data, his group developed an energy forecasting and optimization system for Pakistan’s National Grid that saves billions in idle fuel costs in collaboration with Ignite National Technology Fund, and the Ministry of Information Technology and Telecom
Dr. Arshad has published close to fifty research articles in top international journals and conferences. He has also authored PRECON, the most comprehensive open residential energy data collection in the world. He is the co-founder of multiple start-up companies in big data and electric vehicle domains.
The research interests of Dr. Arshad include electric vehicles, short, medium, and long term forecasting of energy demand, renewable energy generation forecasting for wind and solar resources, demand-side management in electric transportation, agricultural, residential and industrial sectors, energy efficiency, and renewable energy integration in the existing building stock. Dr. Arshad holds MS and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
naveedarshad@lums.edu.pk
Teaching Fellow, Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences
nazishafraz@lums.edu.pk
Nazish Afraz
Teaching Fellow
Nazish Afraz is a Teaching Fellow at the Department of Economics at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. She has also taught BCURE, a Harvard University designed training program to equip civil servants to become more effective commissioners and consumers of evidence. She has over fifteen years of experience in teaching, and in conducting research to support evidence based public policy making in the UK and in Pakistan. She is also an affiliate at the Consortium for Development Policy Research. Research interests include industrial development, skills and trade. She has completed an MPhil in Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science, an MSc in Economics and Finance from the University of Bristol, and has an undergraduate degree from the Lahore University of Management Sciences.
nazishafraz@lums.edu.pk
Assistant Professor, Mushtaq Ahmed Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences
noaman.ali@lums.edu.pk
Noaman Ghazanfar Ali
Assistant Professor
Noaman’s research concerns the political sociology of political and economic development. His research has examined rural class struggle and subnational state formation in Pakistan, which he studied through a case study of the Frontier peasant movement in the former North-West Frontier Province led by the Mazdoor Kisan Party in the 1970s. His work is interdisciplinary, bringing a historical and ethnographic sensibility to the study of political science. More broadly he is interested in social movements, rural politics, state and non-state power, agrarian and industrial policy, developmental states, and political economy in general.
Noaman’s research has been published in the Journal of Agrarian Change and Rethinking Marxism, and he has also written for Tanqeed. He is currently working on a book manuscript based on his dissertation research.
noaman.ali@lums.edu.pk
Professor of Physics, Ahmad Dawood Chair, and Dean at Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, LUMS
sabieh@gmail.com
Sabieh Anwar
Professor of Physics, Ahmad Dawood Chair, and Dean at Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, LUMS
Dr. Muhammad Sabieh Anwar is a Professor of physics, Ahmad Dawood Chair, and Dean at the LUMS Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering. He helped establish the physics department at LUMS and was among the principal founders of the School’s experimental facilities and curriculum. Ideas from his physics instructional laboratories have been replicated in ten Pakistani universities. He has played an important role in introducing innovative learning tools, mostly revolving around insightful homegrown physics experiments, in Pakistan’s universities. His lectures are interspersed with in-class live demonstrations and are widely viewed over the internet.
Sabieh’s research interests encompass spintronics, magnetism, and optics. Sabieh has published around eighty research articles in international journals including Science, the Physical Review series, Optics Express, Journal of the American Chemical Society, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. His book on tabletop quantum mechanics experiments with single photons has recently been published by the Institute of Physics, UK.
sabieh@gmail.com
Assistant Professor of Economics at the Lerner College of Business and Economics, University of Delaware
sabrin.beg@gmail.com
Sabrin Beg
Assistant Professor of Economics at the Lerner College of Business and Economics, University of Delaware
Sabrin Beg is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Lerner College of Business and Economics of the University of Delaware. Beg has a Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University, with a primary area of expertise in development, economic history, political economy, and applied microeconomics. Beg is currently working on projects in the above fields in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Ghana, and India. Recent work by Beg attempts to understand the process of structural change in developing economies, with a focus on property rights, gender, and human capital.
sabrin.beg@gmail.com
Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS
sadafah@lums.edu.pk
Sadaf Ahmad
Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS
Sadaf Ahmad is an Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences at LUMS.
She is the author of Transforming Faith: A Story of Al-Huda and Islamic Revivalism Among Urban Pakistani Women (2009) and the editor of Pakistani Women: Multiple Locations and Competing Narratives (2010). Gender has been a cross-cutting theme in her research to date and it has intersected with a variety of domains: religious revivalism, indigenous women’s social movements, gender-based violence, and Pakistani cinema. Her current research project is on Pakistani policewomen.
Dr. Ahmad received her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Syracuse University in 2006.
sadafah@lums.edu.pk
Assistant Professor, Mushtaq Ahmed Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences
saher.asad@lums.edu.pk
Saher Asad
Assistant Professor
Dr. Sahar Asad is Assistant Professor of Economics at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). She received her Ph.D. in Economics from George Washington University in 2016. Her research interests are primarily in the area of empirical development economics. She uses both experimental and quasi-experimental methods to answer questions within development economics.
saher.asad@lums.edu.pk
Assistant Professor, Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences
asad.sherafghan@gmail.com
Sher Afghan
Assistant Professor
Dr. Sher Afghan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at Lahore University of Management Sciences. His research studies behavioral economics with a focus on social preferences and behavior change in general. His work utilizes a variety of methods including lab experiments, field experiments, observational data, and theoretical modeling. He applies his work to issues of discrimination and public finance. Sher Afghan completed his Ph.D. as a Fulbright scholar from the Iowa State University in 2020.
asad.sherafghan@gmail.com
Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, LUMS
uzma.afzal@cbid.org
Uzma Afzal
Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, LUMS
Uzma Afzal is an Assistant Professor (tenure track) at the Department of Economics, MGSHSS, Lahore University of Management and Sciences (LUMS). She is also an Associate Fellow at the Institute of Development Alternatives (IDEAs), Pakistan, and a Fellow at the Center for Behavioral Institutional Design (CBID), NYUAD.
Dr. Afzal received her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Nottingham, with a specialization in Behavioral and Experimental Economics. She also completed a one-year PostDoc from NYUAD in 2020-2021.
Her research interests lie in behavioral and experimental economics and applied microeconomics to study topics in development and health economics, gender, social norms and decision-making, microfinance, and firm behavior.
uzma.afzal@cbid.org -
C-K
Professor of Practice, The London School of Economics and Political Science
A.Q.Khan@lse.ac.uk
Adnan Khan
Professor of Practice
Dr. Adnan Khan is Professor in Practice and Academic Director at the School of Public Policy at London School of Economics. His academic experience prior to this includes being a Research and Policy Director at the IGC since 2009 and during 2018-19, he taught Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School.
Before joining academia, Dr. Khan served in the Pakistan Administrative Service including stints at the National School of Public Policy, the Education and Finance Ministries, and district administration.
His areas of interest include state capacity and fragility, political economy and public finance. He has conducted field experiments on taxation, public procurement, social protection and entrepreneurship.
Dr. Khan holds a PhD in Economics from Queen’s University Kingston and a Masters in Public Administration from Harvard Kennedy School Cambridge. He did his B.S.c. in Engineering from University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore and has a Diploma in International Affairs from Punjab University.
A.Q.Khan@lse.ac.uk
Executive Director, Mahbub Ul Haq Research Centre
cheema@lums.edu.pk
Ali Cheema
Director
Ali Cheema serves as the Director of the Mahbub Ul Haq Research centre, and is an Associate Professor of Economics at the Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS. Cheema is also a Senior Research Fellow at IDEAS Pakistan, co-founder of the centre for Economic Research in Pakistan (CERP), and a co-lead academic of the International Growth centre’s Pakistan programme. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex and was the Chair of the Economics Department at LUMS from 2004-2010. He was also a founding member of the Stockholm Challenge Award-winning portal, Relief Information System for Earthquakes, Pakistan (RISEPAK).
His areas of research include economic development with a focus on human capital, inclusion and economic mobility, gender, public economics, comparative politics, economic history, and the economics of crime. His research combines extensive mixed-methods fieldwork, historical archival research, rigorous empirical analysis, and theory to offer insights into how political economy and historical foundations shape economic and political development. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Cambridge, an MPhil in Economics and Politics from Cambridge, a BA (Hons.) in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) from Oxford where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and a BA in Mathematics and Statistics from Government College, Lahore. He was a visiting Fulbright and SAI Scholar at Harvard Kennedy School from 2010-11.
Dr. Ali Cheema is part of the board of directors for the State Bank of Pakistan since July 2022.
cheema@lums.edu.pk
Assistant Professor, Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences
amen.jaffer@lums.edu.pk
Amen Jaffer
Assistant Professor
Amen Jaffer is a sociologist trained in urban ethnography whose teaching, research and advising interests lie in the fields of religion, urban studies, sociality, everyday life, difference and social control, social theory, political economy of waste and recycling, and the politics of space and infrastructure.
He is currently working on three projects. One is a comparative ethnography of urban citizenship in low-income neighborhoods of Lahore which explores poor residents’ engagements with the infrastructures of their neighborhoods as practices of forging political communities.The second project is a book manuscript that explores practices of sociality in South Asian Sufi shrines. It focuses on ordinary practices in these spaces – conversations, humour, collective preparation and consumption of food and drugs, etc – to demonstrate how an everyday spirituality is constructed through routine practices in these spaces. The third project, for which he is currently conducting fieldwork, investigates the social organization of the waste and recycling economy in Lahore by focusing on scrap yards run by Afghan refugees and jhuggi settlements of low-caste nomadic communities.
amen.jaffer@lums.edu.pk
PhD Candidate at Uppsala University, Sweden
amin.hussain@nek.uu.se
Amin Hussain
Engineer
Amin Hussain did his undergraduate degree in Electronic Engineering from GIKI and worked in the Telecommunication sector as an Engineer for several years with Motorola and NSN. He then went on to pursue his MSc in Economics from LSE, and is currently a Teaching Fellow at LUMS.
amin.hussain@nek.uu.se
Assistant Professor at the Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, LUMS
ammar.ahmed@lums.edu.pk
Ammar Ahmed Khan
Assistant Professor at the Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, LUMS
Dr. Ammar Ahmed Khan is an Assistant Professor at the Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, LUMS. At present, the focus of Dr. Ammar’s research is on understanding the self-assembly mechanisms of liquid crystalline physical gels, and applying them to DSSCs to increase the stability and lifetime. Furthermore, the interaction of organic-semiconductors with two-dimensional materials is also being investigated for chemical and biological sensing applications.
Dr. Khan completed his Ph.D. studies at the University of Cambridge. The focus of his Ph.D. research was studying the application of disc-like (discotic) liquid crystals as hole transport layers in hybrid organic/in-organic dye-sensitized and perovskite solar cells. Furthermore, he also studied the interaction of liquid crystalline phases with two-dimensional graphene layers for display and lasing devices.
ammar.ahmed@lums.edu.pk
Assistant Professor of Public Policy at The Kennedy School, Harvard University
anders_jensen@hks.harvard.edu
Anders Jensen
Assistant Professor of Public Policy at The Kennedy School, Harvard University
Anders Jensen is the Assistant Professor of Public Policy at The Kennedy School, Harvard University. Dr. Jensen received his Ph.D. in Economics from the London School of Economics in 2016 and spent one year at NBER as a post-doctoral fellow before joining HKS. He is also a Faculty Research Fellow at NBER and an International Research Associate at IFS.
His research focuses on public economics and development economics. One set of projects in his work seeks to study the factors that shape the capacity to tax and the choice of tax policy over the long run of development. His second line of work consists in working with tax authorities and other government departments in developing countries.
Through close collaborations and the use of large micro-datasets, these projects study what governments can do, given their constrained capacity to tax, to incrementally improve tax administration, tax enforcement, tax policy, and tax morale. Because of this, Dr. Jensen is currently collaborating with governments in Ghana, Zambia, Liberia, and Brazil.
anders_jensen@hks.harvard.edu
Associate Professor of Public Policy, Department of Political Science, University College London,
dan.honig@ucl.ac.uk
Dan Honig
Associate Professor of Public Policy
Dan Honig is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at University College London’s School of Public Policy/Department of Political Science. His research focuses on the relationship between organizational structure, management practice, and performance in developing country governments and organizations that provide foreign aid. His work is currently focused primarily on “Mission-Driven Bureaucrats”, exploring the relationship between motivation, management practice, and performance in Bangladesh, Ghana, Thailand, and the US amongst other places. Honig is also a non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development, a Fellow of Harvard’s Building State Capability Program & Johns Hopkins SAIS’ Foreign Policy Institute, a member of the Scholars Strategy Network, and on the editorial board of the Journal of Public Policy. In 2021 he was named one of Apolitical’s 100 most influential academics in government.
dan.honig@ucl.ac.uk
Assistant Professor in Political Science and Environmental Studies at the College of Wooster
eah111@georgetown.edu
Erum Haider
Assistant Professor in Political Science and Environmental Studies at the College of Wooster
Erum Haider is an Assistant Professor in Political Science and Environmental Studies at the College of Wooster . Dr. Haider studies the privatization of public goods. Her doctoral research examines the ability of citizens to use political representatives to lobby for better provision. Dr. Haider’s research primarily takes place in Karachi, Pakistan.
Dr. Haider’s work has been funded by the International Growth Center, LSE, UK, the American Institute for Pakistan Studies, and the Georgetown Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
Dr. Haider received her Ph.D. from Georgetown University, Department of Government. She is also the recipient of the USIP Jennings Randolph Peace Scholar pre-doctoral fellowship for 2019-20. Dr. Haider is currently a Research Fellow at the Mahbub ul Haq Research Center in Lahore, Pakistan.
eah111@georgetown.edu
Assistant Professor, Shaikh Ahmed Hassan School of Law (SAHSOL), LUMS
faiza@lums.edu.pk
Faiza Ismail
Assistant Professor, Shaikh Ahmed Hassan School of Law (SAHSOL), LUMS
Dr. Faiza Ismail has joined LUMS as Assistant Professor-Tenure Track in the Shaikh Ahmed Hassan School of Law (SAHSOL). Before joining LUMS, she has worked with the Institute of Business Administration, Karachi as a Research Consultant. Dr. Ismail obtained her Ph.D. in Business and Law from University College Dublin (UCD), Ireland. She completed her LLM from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, and LLB from SM Law College Karachi, Pakistan. Her research examines legal and regulatory issues relevant to IMF, Anti Money Laundering Laws, Cyber Laws in Finance, and Islamic Finance in the US, UK, and Pakistan. Her research interests focus on the legal systems of international financial centers, operations of IMF, money laundering laws, and Islamic finance law.
faiza@lums.edu.pk
Director of the LUMS Energy Institute and Adjunct Faculty in the Electrical Engineering Department, LUMS
fiaz.chaudhry@lums.edu.pk
Fiaz Ahmad Chaudhry
Director of the LUMS Energy Institute and Adjunct Faculty in the Electrical Engineering Department, LUMS
Fiaz Ahmad Chaudhry is the Director of the LUMS Energy Institute and an adjunct faculty in the Electrical Engineering Department at the Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, LUMS. Dr. Chaudhry possesses a doctoral degree in electrical engineering with over 37 years of experience in integrated power system planning, management, and engineering consulting and teaching in utility and academic environments. In addition, he is CEO of Engineers Guild (Pvt.) Ltd., an Engineering Consulting firm. Lately, he was Managing Director at the National Transmission and Despatch Company (NTDC), Pakistan. For the last 24 years; he has held other senior management and practice lead positions internationally where he provided power system solutions to over 200 companies in North America and Central America, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.
fiaz.chaudhry@lums.edu.pk
Associate Professor at the Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS
furrukh@lums.edu.pk
Furrukh Khan
Associate Professor at the Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS
Furrukh Khan is an Associate Professor at the Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS.
His publications have appeared among others in Index on Censorship, AngloFiles, and The International Journal of Punjab Studies as well as a chapter in The Novels of Bapsi Sidhwa (Edited by R.K. Dhawan and Novy Kapadia) and in Gender, Conflict, and Migration (Edited by Navnita Chadha Behera). Dr. Furrukh has also published a case study (2006): Empowerment through Representation: Aurat Foundation’s Initiative in Local Governance. Managing NGOs in Developing Countries (Volume Three: Gender Challenges), edited by Dawood Ghaznavi and Bashir Ahmad Khan.
Dr. Farrukh was hosted by The Center for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi as the ASIA Fellow, funded by a grant from the Asian Scholarship Foundation in 2006. He was selected as the British Academy/ESRC Visiting Fellow from South Asia and the Middle East and affiliated with the University of Manchester in 2007. Additionally, Dr. Furrukh has also directed Stories of the Broken Self, a documentary on the Pakistani women’s narratives of the 1947 Partition.
Dr. Furrukh received his Ph.D. in Postcolonial Studies from the University of Kent at Canterbury
furrukh@lums.edu.pk
Assistant Professor, Syed Ahsan Ali and Syed Maratib Ali School of Education
gulab.khan@lums.edu.pk
Gulab Khan
Assistant Professor
Gulab Khan acquired his PhD in 2013 in educational theory and policy from the College of Education, Pennsylvania State University, United States. He has over 20 years’ experience in the field of education (K through higher education) in both the private and public sector. He started his career in education in 1999 and, for over 16 years, remained associated with the Aga Khan Education Service, Pakistan (AKESP), a subsidiary of the Aga Khan Development Network. At AKESP, he assumed different portfolios ranging from lecturer (taught chemistry to students in grades 8 through higher secondary), school principal, regional head of monitoring, evaluation & research, and manager academics. In 2015 he switched to higher education as an assistant professor at the University of Swat where he also assumed an additional portfolio as Director of Advanced Studies. In 2017, he moved to National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST) in Islamabad.
Gulab joined Syed Ahsan Ali and Syed Maratib Ali School of Education (SoE) at LUMS in 2018 as an assistant professor. His research interests lie at the intersection of policy and practice on issues related to teacher quality, teacher status, educational leadership, and school improvement.
gulab.khan@lums.edu.pk
Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at LUMS
hkarrar@lums.edu.pk
Hasan H. Karrar
Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at LUMS
Hasan H. Karrar is an Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at LUMS; He specializes in modern Chinese and Central Asian history and political economy.
Dr. Karrar’s current research focuses on new economic configurations in the greater Central Asian region (which he takes to be inclusive of western China and northern Pakistan) since the 1980s: bazaar trade and bazaar networks; the new Silk Roads and trade corridors; commercial relations and emerging spatial configurations. More broadly, his work engages with informality, capitalism, and globalization across this region. He is also interested in Asian borderlands and high mountain regions, environmental history and political ecology, foreign relations, and twentieth-century international history
Dr. Karrar’s recent articles have appeared in Globalizations, Central Asian Survey, Critical Asian Studies, and with co-authors in Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, and Critical Public Health. His earlier research on the development of Sino-Central Asian relations appeared as The New Silk Road Diplomacy: China’s Central Asian Foreign Policy Since the Cold War (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2009).
hkarrar@lums.edu.pk
Assistant Professor at the Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, LUMS
hassan.jaleel@lums.edu.pk
Hassan Jaleel
Assistant Professor at the Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, LUMS
Hassan Jaleel is an Assistant Professor at the Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, LUMS. His research interests are in the areas of real-time distributed optimization, game theory, and stochastic geometry. Dr. Jaleel is interested in designing learning mechanisms with global performance guarantees for self-interested agents in large-scale complex networks. Typical application domains of his research include swarm robotics, sensor networks, and irrigation networks. Dr. Jaleel was a Fulbright scholar from 2009–2013 and is a member of IEEE.
Dr. Jaleel received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) with a specialization in Systems and Control from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA.
hassan.jaleel@lums.edu.pk
Associate Professor of Sociology at the Mushtaq Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS
hassan.javid@lums.edu.pk
Hassan Javid
Associate Professor of Sociology at the Mushtaq Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS
Hassan Javid is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the Mushtaq Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS.
Dr. Javid’s research broadly looks at questions related to class, state, and power, with a specific focus on how the institutional legacy of colonialism affects contemporary politics in Pakistan. At present, he is working on several different projects: a book manuscript that explores the mechanisms through which landed elites have been able to reinforce and reproduce their power in Pakistan from the colonial era to the present day; and a study of the history of public welfare provision in Pakistan that seeks to identify and explain the factors impeding efforts at reforming and expanding the provision of healthcare while also exploring how recent innovations in digital governance offer the potential for developing state capacity to implement specific forms of welfare provision such as cash transfers.
He completed his Ph.D. in Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, where he also spent some time as an LSE Fellow in Political Sociology.
hassan.javid@lums.edu.pk
Ph.D. in Public Policy and Administration, Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, University at Albany
hinaaa.k@gmail.com
Hina Khalid
Ph.D. in Public Policy and Administration, Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, University at Albany
Dr. Hina Khalid has a Ph.D. in Public Policy and Administration from the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy at the University at Albany, and a Master in Public Policy from the Lee Kuan Yew School of Policy at the National University of Singapore.
Her research focuses on improving health system performance and reducing health inequities, with a special interest in how institutions, implementation, and politics mediate these outcomes. She is a mixed methods researcher and uses a variety of tools including applied statistics, interviews, and content analysis in her work.
hinaaa.k@gmail.com
Professor at Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, LUMS.
ihussain@lums.edu.pk
Irshad Hussain
Professor at the Department of Chemistry & Chemical Engineering, Syed Babar Ali School of Science & Engineering (SSE), and the founding Chair of the Chemistry Department at LUMS
Irshad Hussain, a Ph.D. graduate of the University of Liverpool (UK), is a Professor at the Department of Chemistry & Chemical Engineering, SBA School of Science & Engineering (SSE), LUMS, Pakistan. He is among the founding faculty members of SBASSE, and the founding Chair of the Chemistry Department at LUMS. He is also the founding Project Director of the Nanobiotech group at the National Institute for Biotechnology & Genetic Engineering (NIBGE), Faisalabad, and has led several National forums on Nanotechnology in Pakistan. Currently, he leads the Functional Nanomaterials group at LUMS that focuses on tuning the size and surface chemistry of nanomaterials for applications in renewable energy technologies, catalysis, biomedical and environmental sciences and has published a decent number of research/review articles in highly prestigious journals in the field. He has served as the Chair of the National Nanotech Experts Panel at Pakistan Council for Science & Technology in 2015 and currently is a member of the National Core Group of Chemistry and Chair of the National Core Group of Nanotechnology formed by the PM Task Force on Science & Technology. He is also the recipient of the 02 Gold Medals in Chemistry by the Pakistan Academy of Sciences (PAS) in 2007 (Prof. Atta-ur-Rahman Gold Medal) & 2014 (PAS Gold Medal).
In 2021, Dr. Hussain was admitted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (FRSC), UK, and also elected as a Fellow of the Pakistan Academy of Sciences.
ihussain@lums.edu.pk
Assistant Professor at the Evans School of Public Policy & Governance, University of Washington
imcohen@uw.edu
Isabelle Cohen
Assistant Professor at the Evans School of Public Policy & Governance, University of Washington
Isabelle Cohen is an Assistant Professor at the Evans School of Public Policy & Governance at the University of Washington, focusing on development and public economics. Dr. Cohen holds a PhD in Economics from UC Berkeley (2021), and a Master’s in Public Policy (2012) and a Bachelor’s in International Relations (2011), both from the College of William & Mary.
Dr. Cohen studies innovations and their potential to change the implementation of governmental and non-governmental activities and services in developing countries, using large-scale randomized control trials to rigorously evaluate new technologies and organizational methods. Her work also touches on many other important issues, including state capacity, education, financial inclusion, and women’s empowerment, in countries including India and Uganda.
imcohen@uw.edu
Assistant Professor of Environment and Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame
mhayat@nd.edu
Maira Hayat
Assistant Professor of Environment and Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame
Maira Hayat is an Assistant Professor of Environment and Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her research develops a conversation between the anthropology of environment, bureaucracy, and law, and is animated by postcolonial critique. Hayat teaches classes on statecraft, environmental politics, and climate change, as well as on community-engaged research. During the academic year, 2022-23, she will be a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.
Hayat’s work has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the American Institute of Pakistan Studies; the Pozen Center for Human Rights, the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, the Nicholson Center for British Studies, and the Leiffer and Orin William Fellowships at the University of Chicago; and the Haas Center for Public Service and Stanford Arts at Stanford University. Prior to joining Notre Dame, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Anthropology and the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University.
mhayat@nd.edu
Assistant Professor at the Shaikh Ahmad Hassan School of Law, LUMS
marva.khan@lums.edu.pk
Marva Khan
Assistant Professor at the Shaikh Ahmad Hassan School of Law, LUMS
Marva Khan is an Assistant Professor at the Shaikh Ahmad Hassan School of Law, Lahore University of Management Sciences. She is also serving as the Co-Editor of the LUMS Law Journal and she is the Co-founder of the Pakistani Feminist Judgments Project. She completed her BA-LL.B (Hons.) from LUMS and LL.M from Harvard Law School on the Fulbright Scholarship. Her main areas of interest include constitutional law, human rights, and gender. Her recent publications include book chapters on disability rights and accessible Information Technology in Pakistan and special courts in Pakistan.marva.khan@lums.edu.pk
Assistant Professor, Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering
mobin.javed@lums.edu.pk
Mobin Javed
Assistant Professor
Dr. Mobin Javed is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at LUMS. Dr. Javed received her Doctorate in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 2016. She then spent a year as a post-doctoral research scholar at the International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, before returning to Pakistan in early 2018. She holds her bachelor degree from the National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), Pakistan.
Dr. Javed is a data enthusiast at heart, interested in harnessing the power of data science to solve problems with real world impact. Her research primarily focuses on analyzing data from large-scale networked systems to understand various properties of the Internet, and to develop practically deployable solutions for fighting cyber threats.
Her industry experience and fellowships include the Data Science for Social Good Program at the University of Chicago (2016), Microsoft Research, Redmond (2014), and Impermium (2013 – acquired by Google). Her awards and honors include a Distinguished Paper Award at USENIX Security 2017, the Internet Defense Prize 2017 ($100K award by Facebook), and the Applied Networking Research Prize 2019. She also takes a keen interest in social impact. As a Data Science for Social Good (DSSG) 2016 fellow, she worked with the Government of Mexico to find data-driven solutions for mitigating poverty in the country. Dr. Javed is also the co-founder of GradApp Lab, Pakistan, a mentoring effort that connects aspiring graduate school applicants with mentors abroad.
In her leisure time, Dr. Javed enjoys running, hiking, and practicing yoga. She is a long-distance runner and has participated in the San Francisco half marathon and Big Sur Relay runs. She also enjoys traveling around the world; her recent travels have taken her to the majestic glaciers and waterfalls of Iceland.
mobin.javed@lums.edu.pk
Associate Professor of Physics at Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, LUMS.
muhammad.faryad@lums.edu.pk
Muhammad Faryad
Associate Professor of Physics at Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, LUMS.
Muhammad Faryad is an Associate Professor of Physics at LUMS. He joined LUMS in July 2014. Before that, he was a postdoctoral research scholar at the Pennsylvania State University from 2012 to 2014. He obtained his MSc and MPhil degrees in electronics from the Quaid-i-Azam University in 2006 and 2008, respectively, with certificates of merit in both degrees. He obtained his Ph.D. degree in engineering science and mechanics from the Pennsylvania State University in 2012 with the best dissertation award by the university.
Dr. Faryad is a computational physicist with research experience in modeling electromagnetics of complex materials, solar cells, and optical sensors. His major contribution is the work on understanding the properties of multiple surface waves guided by the interfaces of nanoengineered thin films. He has co-authored a book on Green functions for electromagnetism of complex materials. Recently, he has started learning quantum algorithms for solving computational problems on quantum computers. His current area of focus is the understanding and mitigation of the effect of noise on quantum algorithms. Furthermore, he was awarded the Galleino Denardo award by the Abdus Salam International Center of Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in 2019 and the Early Career Achievement Award by the department of engineering science and mechanics at the Pennsylvania State University in 2021.
muhammad.faryad@lums.edu.pk
Assistant Professor of Religion at the Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS
nauman.faizi@lums.edu.pk
Nauman Faizi
Assistant Professor of Religion at the Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS
Nauman Faizi is an Assistant Professor of Religion at the Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS.
His research interests include philosophy of religion, philosophical and scriptural hermeneutics, semiotics, and questions surrounding religion and modernity. His current research is focused on philosophic analyses of texts and thinkers wrestling with questions at the interface of religion, secularity, and modernity, with particular focus on how modern religious thinkers thematize relationships between scriptural texts and modern scientific and philosophic discourse. His current teaching work is focused on theories and methods in religious studies and topics within the philosophy of religion.
Dr. Faizi received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, USA
nauman.faizi@lums.edu.pk
Associate Professor, Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences
nida.kirmani@lums.edu.pk
Nida Kirmani
Associate Professor
Dr. Nida Kirmani is Associate Professor of Sociology in the Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. She is also Faculty Director of the Saida Waheed Gender Initiative. Nida has published widely on issues related to gender, Islam, women’s movements, development and urban studies in India and Pakistan. She completed er PhD in 2007 from the University of Manchester in Sociology. Her book, Questioning ‘the Muslim Woman’ Identity and Insecurity in an Urban Indian Locality, was published in 2013 by Routledge. Her current research focuses on urban violence, gender and insecurity in the area of Lyari in Karachi.
nida.kirmani@lums.edu.pk
Assistant Professor, Syed Ahsan Ali and Syed Maratib Ali School of Education
qaisar.khan@lums.edu.pk
Qaisar Khan
Assistant Professor
Dr. Qaisar Khan is serving as an Assistant Professor at the School of Education, LUMS. Previously, he taught basic economics as a lecturer and microeconomics, development economics and research methods as a teaching fellow at KDI School of Public Policy and Management, South Korea. He has also worked as a research fellow in the project titled “international study of learning in higher education,” a joint collaboration of KDI School and Stanford University. Besides, he has over seven years of work experience in managing and implementing development projects with various national and international organizations in Pakistan.
Dr. Khan obtained his PhD in Development Policy from KDI School of Public Policy and Management, South Korea, and a Masters in Development Policy with majors in Public Finance and Social Policy from the same institute. His research interests lie in applied microeconomics particularly in education, health and labor. His recent research examined the causal link between fertility (quantity) and educational outcomes (quality) within families in Pakistan. His work is the first to attempt quality-quantity tradeoff in Pakistan. His research also studied the effect of family planning exposure on fertility choices and reproductive health care in rural Pakistan.
qaisar.khan@lums.edu.pk
Ph.D. candidate in Political Science, Brown University
rehan_jamil@brown.edu
Rehan Jamil
Ph.D. candidate in Political Science, Brown University
Rehan Rafay Jamil is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Brown University. His research interests include the politics of poverty alleviation, social policy, political participation, and state-society linkages in South Asia. His dissertation examines the political origins and citizenship impacts of Pakistan’s largest cash transfer program targeted exclusively at low-income women: The Benazir Income Support Programme (BISP). Rehan was a fellow in the Graduate Program in Development at the Watson Institute at Brown University and the United States Institute for Peace. He has a Master’s degree in International Affairs from Columbia University and a Bachelor’s degree in Politics and History with High Honors from Oberlin College. Prior to starting his doctorate, Rehan worked with the World Bank’s Social Protection and Labor practice in Washington Dc, focusing on social safety nets in South Asia.
rehan_jamil@brown.edu
Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University
gulzar@stanford.edu
Saad Gulzar
Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University
Saad Gulzar is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. His research asks under what conditions can representative government – one that provides equality of voice and influence – improve people’s lives? His work brings evidence from a number of South Asian contexts such as Pakistan, India, and Nepal, to show that those not considered traditionally elite are in fact equally, if not more, capable of competent governance.
Dr. Gulzar received his Ph.D. in Politics at New York University in 2017. Additionally, his work has received the Best Dissertation Award from American Political Science Association’s Experiments Section, as well as the Lawrence Longley Award for the best article published on Representation & Electoral Systems in 2020, and the Paul A. Sabatier Award for the best conference paper on Science, Technology, & Environmental Politics in 2020.
Dr. Gulzar works closely with politicians, political parties, bureaucrats, and government agencies in Pakistan, India, and Nepal, and strives to make these collaborations meaningful for research and policy. His work has been published in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, the Journal of Politics, the Journal of Development Economics, and the Journal of the European Economic Association.
gulzar@stanford.edu
Assistant Professor of Political Science, Yale University
sarah.khan@yale.edu
Sarah Khan
Assistant Professor of Political Science
Dr. Sarah Khan is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Yale University, where she is also affiliated with the South Asian Studies Council and the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Council. Her research interests are in gender and comparative politics, with a regional specialization in South Asia. In her work, she uses surveys and field experiments to study gender gaps in political preferences, patterns of preference expression, and the barriers to women’s political participation and representation. In another strand of research, she explores questions related to the prevention of violence against women. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University in 2019, and was previously a doctoral candidate fellow at the Center for Global Development and visiting scholar at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. She is a member of the Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP) and the Empirical Study of Gender (EGEN) research networks, and an Associate Fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives (IDEAS).
sarah.khan@yale.edu
Associate Professor, Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences
hasanain@lums.edu.pk
Syed Ali Hasanain
Associate Professor
Ali Hasanain is an Associate Professor and the Head of the Economics Department at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). He is also a member of Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP), a member of the research board of PRIME Institute, a Fellow of the Consortium of Development Policy Research (CDPR), and a faculty advisor at the Technology for People Initiative (TPI).
His research focuses primarily on how public service delivery can be improved through reform initiatives, particularly through technological progress and improvements in the media. He also studies how information and communication technologies (ICT) can improve market functioning.
Previously, he directed the LUMS engagement on the World Bank’s Pakistan At One Hundred Initiative, which sought to support greater debate and study Pakistan’s medium term future, out to the year 2047. He has also previously been a member of the Punjab Government’s Economic Advisory Committee. With his colleagues, Dr. Hasanain designed and implemented an ICT-based monitoring pilot in partnership with the provincial government of Punjab in 2011. He also served as South Asia Team Leader for a Global Development Network (GDN) policy research project during 2011-2012.
Ali Hasanain received his PhD from George Mason University in 2010. From 2014 to 2016, he was a Global Leaders Fellow at Oxford and Princeton universities.
hasanain@lums.edu.pk
Assistant Professor, Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences
syed.hasan@lums.edu.pk
Syed M Hasan
Assistant Professor
Dr. Syed M Hasan is Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics, LUMS. His primary research interest and teaching field is urban and regional economics and public economics. Dr. Hasan obtained his PhD in Economics from Ohio State University in 2014. His doctoral research focused on spatial policy instruments and firms productivity. Under the broad theme of sustainable development, Dr. Hasan also has interest in research on resilient cities. In this context his research focuses on areas related to water conservation, economic cost of congestion and energy choices by households and related carbon emissions in large urban centers of Pakistan. Dr. Hasan has several publications in international peer-reviewed journals. In 2007 he did he master’s in public finance from GRIPS, Tokyo, Japan. Prior to joining the academia, Dr. Hasan has worked in the civil service of Pakistan.
syed.hasan@lums.edu.pk
Ph.D. Candidate in the Political Science department, University of California-San Diego
ssijaz@ucsd.edu
Syeda ShahBano Ijaz
Ph.D. Candidate in the Political Science department, University of California-San Diego
Syeda ShahBano Ijaz is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Political Science department at the University of California-San Diego. Her research is situated at the cusp of international development and comparative politics, and explores the strategic distributive politics of foreign aid delivery in developing countries. Ijaz argues that the presence of high last-mile hurdles in the form of bureaucratic costs and low physical mobility carve a significant role for local politicians in aid economies. Additionally, the salience of last-mile services for poor voters mobilizes them to increase demands on representatives, allowing a localized form of accountability to emerge around the last mile.
Ijaz’s current research focuses on Pakistan and she has accumulated two years of fieldwork experience in the country. Before joining UCSD, She completed an M.A. in Politics from New York University and an MS.c. in Economics for Development from the University of Oxford as a Commonwealth Scholar.
In 2017, she was a USIP Junior Peace Fellow at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. Previously, she has consulted with the World Bank, UNICEF, and the Adam Smith Institute.
ssijaz@ucsd.edu
Assistant Professor, Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences
umair.javed@lums.edu.pk
Umair Javed
Assistant Professor
Dr. Umair Javed is Assistant Professor of Politics and Sociology at the Mushtaq Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences (MGSHSS). He completed his PhD at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in 2018, where he was a recipient of the LSE Centennial PhD Studentship.
His doctoral research focused on politics and practices of accumulation, and labour relations in Pakistan”s informal economy, with a specific focus on the retail-wholesale (bazaar) sector. More broadly, his research interests span various aspects of political participation, socio-economic development, and urban public life in South Asia. His academic work has been published in Economic and Political Weekly, Current History, and Catalyst’: >- A Journal of Theory and Strategy. He has also contributed book chapters to volumes published by Routledge, Cambridge University Press, and the Australian National University Press. He is currently working on a cross-country study of contentious mobilisation around energy access in low-income settlements in Pakistan, Mozambique, and Nigeria, with researchers at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), University of Sussex.
umair.javed@lums.edu.pk
Assistant Professor at the Shaikh Ahmad Hassan School of Law, LUMS
uzair.kayani@lums.edu.pk
Uzair Kayani
Assistant Professor at the Shaikh Ahmad Hassan School of Law, LUMS
Uzair Jamil Kayani is an Assistant Professor at the Shaikh Ahmad Hassan School of Law, LUMS.
Dr.Kyani studied social choice and game theory with Professors Elizabeth M. Penn and John W. Patty at Washington University in St. Louis. He studied law and economics with Professor Richard Epstein, Judge Richard Posner, Professor William Landes, and Professor Douglas Baird at the University of Chicago. Earlier, Dr. Kyani had studied political philosophy, literature, and the Classics at Middlebury College (Vermont) and Deep Springs College (California).
Dr. Kyani teaches Torts, Commercial Law, and Law & Economics. Tort liability distributes the costs of social and economic harms to those parties that can best prevent, bear, or insure against them. Commercial law sets default rules for market exchange (sales, negotiable instruments, and securities), and market participants (partnerships, corporations, and hybrid forms). Economic analysis of law applies microeconomic insights (primarily price theory, game theory, and social choice) to study the incentives created by law and other forms of regulation.
uzair.kayani@lums.edu.pk
Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics at the University of Pittsburgh
yasir.khan@pitt.edu
Yasir Khan
Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics at the University of Pittsburgh
Muhammad Yasir Khan an Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics at the University of Pittsburgh. His research lies at the intersection of development economics, behavioral economics, and political economy.
Dr. Khan received his Ph.D. from the University of California Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.
Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS
zebunnisa.hamid@lums.edu.pk
Zebunnisa Hamid
Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS
Zebunnisa Hamid is an Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS. Dr. Hamid’s research focuses on gender and the crisis of masculinity, the transnational city and urban spaces on screen, and the industries of small cinemas. She is developing the concept of the ‘transnational cinematic city’ where these streams connect and interact with each other.
Dr. Hamid is currently working on her book on New Pakistani Cinema in which she explores the concept of the ‘transnational cinematic city further. Zebunnisa has trained as a film editor at The Edit Centre in New York and worked as a production consultant on Mira Nair’s film, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2012). She has also served on Pakistan’s Oscar committee to select the country’s official submission for the International Feature Film Award category at the Academy Awards.
Dr. Hamid received her doctorate in Film Studies from SOAS, University of London, in 2017. She has a MA in Journalism from Goldsmiths, University of London, and a BA from New York University (NYU).
After completing her Ph.D., Dr. Hamid held the position of Research Associate at SOAS and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at LUMS.
zebunnisa.hamid@lums.edu.pk
Associate Professor at the Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, LUMS
zubair.khalid@lums.edu.pk
Zubair Khalid
Associate Professor at the Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, LUMS
Zubair Khalid is an Associate Professor at the Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, LUMS. Dr. Khalid’s research is focused on the development of new signal processing techniques to analyze signals defined on the sphere, analysis and processing of signals defined on the sphere find applications in various fields of science and engineering, such as cosmology, geophysics, acoustics, and medical imaging.
Dr. Khalid was awarded University Gold Medal and Industry Gold Medals from Siemens and Nespak for overall outstanding performance in Electrical Engineering during his undergraduate studies. Additionally, he was a recipient of an Endeavour International Postgraduate Award for his Ph.D. studies.
Dr. Khalid received his Ph.D. degree in Engineering from the Australian National University of Canberra, Australia in 2013
zubair.khalid@lums.edu.pk -
L-M
Assistant Professor, Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences
antonio@lums.edu.pk
Antonio Marasco
Assistant Professor
Antonio Marasco joined LUMS as an Assistant Professor in August 2006. Prior to joining LUMS, he had a one-year teaching appointment in Atilim University, Ankara. From 1990 to 1994 he was employed in the insurance sector at Lloyd Adriatico of Trieste.
He has been a teaching assistant at the University College, London and a visiting instructor at Bilkent University. His teaching interests are in macroeconomics, growth theories, and international trade. His research focuses broadly on the relationship between foreign direct investment, technological progress and economic growth. Another aspect of Antonio’s research has also been about studying the welfare impact of foreign direct investment and international trade on the recipient countries. Antonio holds a PhD from Radbound University, a Msc in Economics from Birbeck College, a MBA from Koc University, and a Bsc in Economics from the University of Trieste.
antonio@lums.edu.pk
Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Suleman Dawood School of Business, LUMS
ayesha.masood@lums.edu.pk
Ayesha Masood
Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Suleman Dawood School of Business, LUMS
Ayesha Masood is an Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Suleman Dawood School of Business. Dr. Masood obtained her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Arizona State University, USA in 2017. Her dissertation research project on women doctors’ representation in the health workforce was funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the American Institute of Pakistan Studies. Her prior education includes an MA in Political Science from the University of Punjab, and an MBBS degree from King Edward Medical College, Lahore. Prior to joining LUMS, Dr. Masood taught at Information Technology University and served as a doctor at Mayo Hospital Lahore.
Her research, broadly situated in feminist and critical methodologies, focuses on issues related to gender in organizations, evidence-based health policy, managing human resources in health, and policy implementation. Her work has been published in top-ranked journals of the world including Gender Work & Organization, Organization, Sex Roles and Gender, Place and Culture.
ayesha.masood@lums.edu.pk
Dr. Masood is currently working on developing a book on the work of women health providers in Pakistan. Her current research interests include cultural influences on network formation, front-line bureaucracy, and evidence-based health policy formulation.
Assistant Professor, Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences
fatima.mustafa@lums.edu.pk
Fatima Mustafa
Assistant Professor
Dr. Fatima Mustafa is an Assistant Professor at the Mushtaq Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences. She completed her PhD from the Department of Political Science at Boston University in 2018. Her dissertation relies on the Pakistan Institute of Peace Studies (PIPS) dataset to study the relationship between the use of communication technology and violence. Before joining LUMS, she taught a course for a semester at Boston University. She also taught at LUMS as a Teaching Fellow for several semesters. In the past, she has served as a Carnegie Fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington DC.
fatima.mustafa@lums.edu.pk
IDS Research Fellow and ICTD Research Director
g.mascagni@ids.ac.uk
Giulia Mascagni
IDS Research Fellow and ICTD Research Director
Giulia is currently working at IDS as Research Fellow and as the Research Director of the International Centre for Taxation and Development (ICTD). Giulia Mascagni’s main area of work is taxation, but she also has a research interest in public finance, evaluation of public policy, and aid effectiveness. At IDS she teaches economics, taxation, and public finance at the postgraduate level and on professional short courses.
Previously she worked as Associate Tutor at the University of Sussex, as an independent consultant for ITAD, the World Bank, the Overseas Development Institute, and as Adviser and Trainee at the European Commission.
Dr. Mascagni is an economist by training, holding a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Sussex. Her main geographical interest lies in African countries, with a particular focus on Ethiopia and Rwanda.
g.mascagni@ids.ac.uk
Associate Professor, Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences
hadia.majid@lums.edu.pk
Hadia Majid
Associate Professor
Dr. Hadia Majid is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics, Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) and Director, Saida Waheed Gender Initiative, (LUMS)
A Fulbright Scholar, Dr. Hadia Majid holds a PhD in Development Economics from The Ohio State University. Her research agenda considers the impact of monetary and public resource constraints on individuals in Pakistan. Her work includes cash transfer evaluations, public goods provisioning, human capital acquisition in the context of intra-household decision-making, and factors affecting women’s access to earned income. Here, she documents and explores the barriers to women’s labor supply and their access to decent, empowering work with a special emphasis on the role of household bargaining structures in mediating women’s access to work. Her expertise lies in RCT, quasi-experimental, and quantitative driven fieldwork. She has also done qualitative work with low-literate, low-income informal and formal sector women workers.
hadia.majid@lums.edu.pk
Assistant Professor at Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, LUMS.
hassan.mohyuddin@lums.edu.pk
Hassan Mohy-ud-Din
Assistant Professor and Director of the Clinical and Translational Imaging Lab at LUMS
Dr. Hassan Mohy-ud-Din is the Director of the Clinical and Translational Imaging lab and an
Assistant Professor at the LUMS School of Science and Engineering. He completed his Ph.D. and MSE in
Electrical and Computer Engineering and MA in Applied Mathematics and Statistics from Johns Hopkins University (2009 – 2015). From 2015 – 2017 he was a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging at the Yale School of Medicine. From 2017 – 2018 he was a Clinical Research Scientist at Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital and Research Centre. His research lies at the intersection of Applied Mathematics and Medical Imaging. His work on dynamic cardiac PET imaging won the 2014 SNMMI Bradley-Alavi fellowship and the 2014 SIAM student award.He is also a recipient of the 2019 Charles Wallace Fellowship from the British Council, Pakistan. His work on non-invasive biomarker quantification for coronary microcirculation was featured as a news story in Medical Physics followed by a dedicated review article from Stanford. He also serves as a reviewer on major scientific journals (Clinical Cancer Research, Neuro-oncology Advances, Medical Image Analysis, Neuroimage, Physics in Medicine and Biology, Medical Physics, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing to name a few) and is a member of IEEE and SIAM societies. He also carries a university teaching experience of over 15 years (UET Lahore, SBASSE LUMS, and Johns Hopkins University) and is deeply interested in the development, implementation, and evaluation of (pragmatic and effective) pedagogical approaches in schools and colleges.
hassan.mohyuddin@lums.edu.pk
Assistant Professor, Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences
kashif.malik@lums.edu.pk
Kashif Zaheer Malik
Assistant Professor
Dr. Kashif Zaheer Malik is an Assistant Professor of Economics at LUMS. He is a Fulbright Scholar and has a Masters and PhD degree in Economics from Florida State University. Dr. Malik is an economist with over twelve years of experience in the areas of Microfinance, Applied Economics, Econometrics and Economic Analysis. He has done research and consulting assignments for International agencies (IPA, IGC, DFID, World Bank, Global Fund to End Slavery), MNC’s (Coca-Cola), Banks(Barclays’s) and Government. His academic research is published in esteemed journals such as in Oxford Review of Economic Policy (OXREP), Economic Modelling and Journal of Economics and Finance.
His current research looks at risk-sharing financial contracts within the microfinance industry. Dr. Malik along with a team of researchers from University of Oxford has been investigating whether the debt-based nature of microcredit contracts (often with high interest repayments that are quite rigid) may be one of the reasons for the disappointing results on microcredit, and whether a contract based on the principles of equity financing which helps the entrepreneur better share in risk and reward, may be more successful in stimulating microenterprise growth.
kashif.malik@lums.edu.pk
Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, University of Waterloo, Canada
mmufti@uwaterloo.ca
Mariam Mufti
Associate Professor, Department of Political Science
Dr. Mariam Mufti is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Waterloo, Canada. She studies the politics of hybrid regimes, with a particular focus on the role of the military, political parties, and identity in the processes of recruitment and selection of the political elite in Pakistan. She has published articles in peer-reviewed journals such as Comparative Politics, Publius, and Journal of Women, Politics, and Policy and co-edited the volume on Pakistan’s Political Parties: Surviving between Democracy and Dictatorship (Georgetown University Press 2020). Dr. Mufti also has considerable policy-relevant consultancy experience, having authored monographs on democratic development, political parties, and religious extremism for The Asia Foundation, Centre for Strategic International Studies (CSIS), and Department for International Development (DFID). Dr. Mufti has written over 25 articles for widely-read international newspapers, magazines, and blogs on politics in South Asia. In keeping with her interest in undemocratic, hybrid regimes, she has also appeared in a 6-part series The Dictator’s Playbook on PBS (released in 2018) and How to be a Tyrant on Netflix (released 2021).
mmufti@uwaterloo.ca
Assistant Professor, Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering
maryam_mustafa@lums.edu.pk
Maryam Mustafa
Assistant Professor
Dr. Maryam Mustafa is a PhD in Computer Science from the Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany and is an Assistant Professor at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan. She is a Fulbright scholar with a Masters from Cornell University, NY.
Dr. Mustafa’s research interests are in human-computer interaction (HCI), mixed realities and information and communication technologies and development (ICTD). Her focus is on designing, building, and evaluating novel computing systems for/with underserved populations in the Global South with a specific focus on the gendered design of technologies in patriarchal contexts. Broadly she is interested in understanding the social, technical, and access constraints of diverse populations and creating new technologies to address their unique contexts and aspirations. Her work has been funded by the Gates foundation, National Academy of Sciences and IDRC.
maryam_mustafa@lums.edu.pk
Assistant Professor, Department of Government, Harvard University
mashailmalik@fas.harvard.edu
Mashail Malik
Assistant Professor at the Department of Government, Harvard University
Mashail Malik is a postdoctoral fellow and incoming Assistant Professor at the Department of Government at Harvard University. She specializes in the political psychology of identity. Her book project is an interdisciplinary, mixed-methods inquiry into the rise and fall of ethnic parties in the megacity of Karachi, Pakistan. Dr. Malik received a Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University, an MA in International Relations from the University of Chicago, and a BA in Economics and Philosophy from Beloit College. She is a native of Islamabad, Pakistan.
mashailmalik@fas.harvard.edu
Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS),the University of Sussex
m.loureiro@ids.ac.uk
Miguel Loureiro
Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS),the University of Sussex
m.loureiro@ids.ac.ukMiguel Loureiro is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), the University of Sussex focusing on the analysis and improvement of state-citizen relations. He investigates the state-citizen interface both from a citizens’ perspective, examining accountability and empowerment relations, and a state’s perspective, identifying opportunities for better state responsiveness.
He trains and advises government research units, schools of government, and bilateral agencies to improve the engagement between research and policymaking, training researchers on how to communicate effectively with policymakers and policymakers to make better use of research in policy processes.
Teaching Fellow, Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences
nadiam@lums.edu.pk
Nadia Mukhtar
Teaching Fellow
A Noon Scholar, Nadia Mukhtar has a Masters in Economics for Development from Oxford University. She is a Teaching Fellow at the Department of Economics at LUMS and her research interests lie in the areas of development microeconomics, trade-related development and industrial organisation. She has researched widely for international development organisations and the government on a breadth of policy issues pertaining to competitiveness and growth of SMEs, youth engagement and social networks, as well as the trade-development nexus.
Her recent works include analysing the impact of youth (dis)engagement on development in Pakistan for the UNDP National Human Development Report 2017 and the effect of social networks on the uptake of microfinance in India. She has also looked at how trade agreements can raise bilateral trade between Pakistan and its neighbors (China, India and the Central Asian Republics). Policy work includes regional benchmarking of the competitiveness of Pakistan’s automotive and ready-made garments sectors that informed key government policies. Currently, she is looking at how Pakistan can harness the export potential of its pharmaceutical sector and is also using a survey-based study to assess the economic impact of COVID-19 on SMEs across Pakistan.
nadiam@lums.edu.pk
Chief Executive Officer, Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives ( IDEAS)
rabea.malik@ideaspak.org
Rabea Malik
Chief Executive Officer
Dr. Rabea Malik is a Research Fellow and CEO at IDEAS with over 10 years of experience in empirical mixed methods research in Pakistan.
Rabea’s expertise lies in application of sociological and political economy frameworks to questions of exclusion, school governance and service delivery in education. Rabea has led research projects on marketization of primary education, public private partnerships, school-based management, inclusive education and effective teaching. She was the country co-I in Pakistan for Teaching Effectively All Children, was the technical lead for the evaluation of the Punjab Education Sector Program II.
She is currently undertaking a study on bureaucratic practice and delivery in education in Punjab and Sindh, using qualitative retrospective comparative methods. She has published on inequality in education, teaching practices and marginalization in government classrooms, experiences of learning for children from marginalized backgrounds.
rabea.malik@ideaspak.org
Assistant Professor, University of Essex, UK
rabia.malik@lums.edu.pk
Rabia Malik
Assistant Professor
Dr. Rabia Malik’s research focuses on comparative politics in developing countries, with a particular interest in distributive politics and development, political accountability, and gender and political participation, especially in the context of Pakistan and other South Asian countries. Her research combines causal inference methods with extensive fieldwork to study these topics using both observational and experimental data. She has published in the Journal of Politics, the British Journal of Political Science, and Comparative Political Studies. Rabia received her Ph.D. from the University of Rochester and was then a postdoctoral associate at New York University Abu Dhabi.
rabia.malik@lums.edu.pk
Postdoctoral Fellow in Economics, New York University, Abu Dhabi
rafatmahmood214@gmail.com
Rafat Mahmood
Postdoctoral Fellow in Economics
Rafat Mahmood is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Economics at New York University, Abu Dhabi. She holds a Masters and M.Phil. in Economics from Quaid-i-University, Islamabad, and a Ph.D. from the University of Western Australia. Rafat Mahmood is primarily interested in topics in political economy and international security. Her Ph.D. dissertation explores various dimensions of terrorism, analyzing the impact of US drone strikes on terrorism in one of her papers. Her current work includes an analysis of the determinants of civil conflict and war and the role of religious seminaries in terrorism, among other projects involving international security. She is also a junior fellow at the AALIMS. Prior to her current appointment, Rafat was a researcher at the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics.
rafatmahmood214@gmail.com
Assistant Professor, Qatar University
rmemon@qu.edu.qa
Rashid Memon
Assistant Professor
Rashid is an Assistant Professor at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. He holds a PhD in Economics from the New School for Social Research.
Rashid’s work showcases his interest in the importance of social and political identity for economic outcomes, and he has a long standing interest in internal and international migration from South Asia. He uses both quantitative and qualitative data collection methods for his research, and has led large household survey data collection efforts as well as experimental data, and semi-structured interviews and focus groups. His interest in identity and economics has led him to question the robustness of disciplinary boundaries, and to reconsider the link between economic, cultural and political change. He is keenly interested in more substantive discussions on the poverty of methodological individualism and questioning how markets handle (or fail to handle) basic problems of resource allocation.
rmemon@qu.edu.qa
Assistant Professor, Mushtaq Ahmed Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences
sameen.ali@lums.edu.pk
Sameen Mohsin
Assistant Professor
‘Dr. Sameen A. Mohsin Ali completed her PhD in Politics from SOAS University of London in 2018. Her doctoral thesis, “Staffing the State: The Politicisation of Bureaucratic Appointments in Pakistan”, explores the use of bureaucratic appointments by both politicians and bureaucrats to achieve particular outcomes. Sameen’s teaching and research interests include bureaucratic and party politics and public health governance. She is currently working on a project, “Understanding Pakistan’s Immunization Problem: A transactional approach”, with Dr Samia W. Altaf, funded by the Shahid Hussain Foundation’s Public Health Research Grant 2018-19 and 2019-20, and the Faculty Initiative Fund 2020-21.
Sameen is a faculty lead at the Technology for People Initiative (TPI), a non-profit applied research centre based at LUMS.
sameen.ali@lums.edu.pk
Research Fellow, Institute for Development Studies, University of Sussex
s.mohmand@ids.ac.uk
Shandana Khan Mohmand
Research Fellow
Dr. Shandana Khan Mohmand is Research Fellow in the Governance cluster at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex.
She has over 18 years of experience teaching undergraduate, graduate, and professional training courses.
As a social scientist, her research has increasingly focused on the relationship between political participation, inequality and accountability and her research interests include democratisation, local politics, and the political economy of public policy and service delivery.
She has a D.Phil in Development Studies and a Masters in Governance and Development from IDS, University of Sussex. She also holds a Masters in Sustainable International Development from Brandeis University (USA) and a BA in Political Science and Economics from McGill University (Canada).
s.mohmand@ids.ac.uk
Associate Professor, Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, LUMS
shaper.mirza@lums.edu.pk
Shaper Mirza
Associate Professor, Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, LUMS
Trained as an Immunologist and Molecular Microbiologist, Dr. Shaper Mirza is an Associate Professor at the Department of Biology, Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering. Before joining LUMS, Dr Mirza served as an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas-Health Science Center, Brownsville and Houston campuses.
Working with a cohort of 2500 Mexican Americans living on the Texas-Mexico border, Dr. Mirza demonstrated the role of hyperglycemia in poorly controlled diabetes on immune impairments. She further demonstrated that hyperglycemia impairs immune cells in the body leading to increase in susceptibility to upper respiratory tract infections such as tuberculosis and pneumonia. This was the extension of her work that she performed during her PhD at University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), where focus of her studies was host-pathogen interaction, in infections caused by Streptococcus pneumoniae. Her research elucidated the mechanism(s) deployed by S. pneumonaie for causing infections and immune responses mounted by the host to restrict infections. The work was the first to demonstrate a role for host mucosal protein lactoferrin in preventing upper respiratory tract infections by S. pneumonaie.
Prior to her PhD studies, Dr. Mirza was instrumental in developing molecular diagnostics for rapid diagnosis of tuberculosis, Hepatitis C and Hepatitis B at the Department of Pathology-Aga Khan University-Karachi. Further, her work led to development of diagnostic serological and molecular methods for Crimean Congo Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF) and Dengue fever.
Dr. Mirza was among the first five Fogarty Fellows from Pakistan. She was awarded the Fellowship to work on Sexually Transmitted Infections in Pakistan. She is currently an active member of American Society for Microbiology, American Diabetes Association, Pakistan Biological Safety Association, and Pakistan Infectious Diseases Society.
shaper.mirza@lums.edu.pk
Professor of Economics at the New Economic School, Moscow
smehmood@nes.ru
Sultan Mehmood
Professor of Economics at the New Economic School, Moscow
Sultan Mehmood is a Professor of Economics (tenure-track) at the New Economic School in Moscow and a lead researcher at the World Bank’s DE JURE Program which funds a large part of his research.
Dr. Mehmood’s research interests are in behavioral, development, and political economy. Particularly, his research seeks to understand the conditions for the establishment of the Rule of Law in societies and its consequences for institutional design and development.
Dr. Mehmood received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Paris in December 2019. He was also a postdoctoral fellow at Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) in Barcelona in 2020. Previously, he studied in the Netherlands and Lahore, Pakistan.
smehmood@nes.ru
Assistant Professor at the Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, LUMS
tajdar.mufti@lums.edu.pk
Tajdar Mufti
Assistant Professor at the Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, LUMS
Tajdar Mufti is an Assistant Professor at the Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, LUMS. Dr. Mufti’s research interests lie in Mathematical Physics and Theoretical Physics with a particular focus on numerical computations and simulations. Most of his research endeavors have been related to quantum field theories of scalar and bosonic fields, particularly using non-perturbative approaches, i.e. the methods of Dyson Schwinger Equations and lattice simulation, in order to explore different aspects of the models for a number of reasons.
Dr. Mufti has taught at the University of Karachi Pakistan and Habib University Karachi Pakistan, while also being a teaching assistant during his Ph.D. studies.
Dr. Mufti received his Ph.D. degree from Friedrich Schiller University Germany with the thesis entitled, “Non-perturbative aspects of Yang-Mills-Higgs theory” using the method of lattice simulations. Additionally, Dr. Mufti received his Master’s in Physics from Lund University Sweden with a thesis with ATLAS group. He has also been part of a research group in Mathematical Physics at Lund University Sweden for a research project.
tajdar.mufti@lums.edu.pk
Assistant Professor at the Center for Water Informatics and Technology (WIT), LUMS
talha.manzoor@lums.edu.pk
Talha Manzoor
Assistant Professor at the Center for Water Informatics and Technology (WIT), LUMS
Talha currently serves as an Assistant Professor at the Center for Water Informatics and Technology (WIT) at LUMS. At the Center, he is involved in modelling and decision making for socio-hydrological systems with a focus on water in agriculture. He is also leading field investigations to study the operational hydrology of small rain-fed catchments through the deployment of hydrometeorological sensor networks and associated technologies.
Talha Manzoor is generally interested in the modelling, control, and estimation of socio-ecological systems where environmental phenomena overlap with societal and technological processes. He is especially intrigued by behavioral processes that lead to unexpected outcomes in complex systems. In his research he employs tools from systems and control theory, treating human behavior as a fundamental component of the system, as opposed to the conventional incorporation of human behavior as disturbances, exogenous inputs, or uncertainties.
talha.manzoor@lums.edu.pk
Partner at Axis Law Chambers
waqqas.mir@axislaw.pk
Waqqas Mir
Partner at Axis Law Chambers
Waqqas Ahmad Mir is a lawyer based in Lahore and is a partner at Axis Law Chambers. He was called to the Bar of England and Wales in 2007 (Lincoln’s Inn). The bulk of his practice consists of litigation in the areas of constitutional, commercial, taxation, competition, white-collar crime, anti-corruption, environmental and civil law. He also routinely advises clients on regulatory compliance regarding doing business in Pakistan and is frequently engaged to advise on merger control, labor and employment as well as the electronic crimes legislation.
Waqqas has been appointed amicus curiae on six different occasions by the Lahore High Court, Lahore in matters relating to taxation, environment, local government, the relationship between the Code of Criminal Procedure, and the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act, constitutional interpretation, etc. Waqqas served as Joint Director (Legal Division) at Competition Commission of Pakistan (CCP) from 2009 to 2010. For the past few years, he has contributed the annual Pakistan Chapter to Getting the Deal Through’s Merger Control guide (published by Law Business Research Limited, UK, in collaboration with Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer).
waqqas.mir@axislaw.pk -
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Assistant Professor, Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering
agha.ali.raza@lums.edu.pk
Agha Ali Raza
Assistant Professor
Dr. Agha Ali Raza is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at LUMS, and also the founding director of the Center for Speech and Language Technologies. He is a Fulbright Scholar. He received his Ph.D. from the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA. His research interests include Speech & Natural Language Processing, Speech-based Human-Computer Interfaces, and Information & Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D).
His research aims to enable information access and social connectivity for under-connected and under-served populations (low-literate, low-income, tech naïve, visually impaired, linguistically/socially marginalized, and geographically remote communities, and oral cultures) throughout the developing world. His work focuses on the development of speech-based information services and social networks accessible over simple and feature phones to be used as vehicles for large-scale dissemination of development-related information, pulling information in the form of real-time surveys and for performing randomized controlled trials and demographic studies. These services also provide target marginalized populations with a voice and a digital social identity.
His work in Speech and Language technologies is focused on the localization of linguistic resources and techniques to the Pakistani context for the development of Speech Recognition, Text-to-Speech, Voice-biometrics, Spoken Term Detection, and relevant capabilities. He teaches Natural Language Processing, Speech Processing, and Machine Learning at the graduate and undergraduate levels. His research has been funded by prestigious organizations including Facebook, Google, UNICEF, GIZ, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, Medicine, Keck Futures Initiative, and the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan.
agha.ali.raza@lums.edu.pk
Associate Professor, Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences
aliraza@lums.edu.pk
Ali Raza
Associate Professor
Ali Raza is a historian of South Asia.He received his DPhil from the University of Oxford and was a research fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin.
His research and teaching interests include the social and intellectual history of South Asia, comparative colonialisms, decolonization, and post-colonial theory. Ali Raza’s work has appeared in leading journals and edited volumes. He is also the co-editor of The Internationalist Moment: South Asia, Worlds, and World Views, 1917-39 (Sage 2014), and the author of Revolutionary Pasts: Communist Internationalism in Colonial India (Cambridge University Press, 2020). In addition to his teaching and research commitments, Ali Raza also heads the Centre for Continuing Education Studies, which is dedicated to extending educational opportunities to diverse learning communities across Pakistan.
aliraza@lums.edu.pk
Associate Professor, Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences
ali.qasmi@lums.edu.pk
Ali Usman Qasmi
Associate Professor
Ali Usman Qasmi is an Associate Professor of History at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at LUMS since 2012. He received his PhD from the South Asia Institute of Heidelberg University in 2009. Before joining LUMS, he was a Newton Fellow for post-doctoral research at Royal Holloway College, University of London. He has published extensively in reputed academic journals such as Modern Asian Studies and Journal of Islamic Studies. He is the author of Questioning the Authority of the Past: The Ahl al-Qur’an Movements in the Punjab (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2011), and his second monograph, The Ahmadis and the Politics of Religious Exclusion in Pakistan (London: Anthem Press, 2014), was the recipient of Karachi Literature Festival (KLF) Peace Prize in 2015.
ali.qasmi@lums.edu.pk
Assistant Professor at the Institute for Ecological Economics, Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU)
asjadnaqvi@gmail.com
Asjad Naqvi
Assistant Professor at the Institute for Ecological Economics, Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU)
Asjad Naqvi is working as a Senior Economist at the Austrian Institute for Economic Research (WIFO), as an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Ecological Economics, Department of Socioeconomics, Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU), and as a Researcher Scholar, in the Advancing Systems Analysis (ASA) program at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). From 2011-2013, Naqvi was the Research Director at the Center for Economic Research in Pakistan (CERP). Dr. Naqvi received his Ph.D. in Economics from the New School for Social Research (New York) (2007-2012) and his habilitation in Economics in 2020. Prior to 2007, he was based at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) working on various research projects.
Currently, Dr. Naqvi is interested in exploring topics of environment inequality, cascading impact of climate shocks, climate finance, and North-South interactions. He works with macroeconomic models, agent-based models, and causal inference (DiDs, RDDs).
asjadnaqvi@gmail.com
Director of Research and Growth at The Life You Can Save
bilalmsiddiqi@gmail.com
Bilal Siddiqi
Director of Research and Growth at The Life You Can Save
Bilal Siddiqi serves as Director of Research and Growth at The Life You Can Save, where he lead in-house research and evaluation and help set strategy for charity selection, fundraising, and partnerships.
Dr. Siddiqi is a development economist working on poverty, institutions, and conflict in low- and middle-income countries. His academic research applies experimental methods to fundamental problems of development. His work has been published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Science, Lancet, and others, and covered by the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, CBS, New York Magazine, Voice of America, Le Monde, VoxEU, the Daily Mail, Economic, and Political Weekly, the Hindustan Times, Público, El Espectador, and several other outlets.
Dr. Siddiqi has also received generous support from the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office, USAID, the US DoD’s Minerva Research Initiative, the World Bank, the UN Peacebuilding Fund, the Open Society Foundation, 3ie, the International Growth Centre, and Stanford University.
Dr. Siqqiqi is also a non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development, a member of Evidence in Governance and Politics, a research affiliate of the International Growth Centre and Innovations for Poverty Action, and a fellow of the Centre for Economic Research in Pakistan, the Consortium for Development Policy Research and the Mahbub Ul Haq Research Centre.
Dr . Siddiqi received his Ph.D. and M.Phil. in Economics from Oxford University, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar.
bilalmsiddiqi@gmail.com
Assistant Professor, University of Maryland
corybsmith@gmail.com
Cory Smith
Assistant Professor
Dr Smith is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Dartmouth Political Economy Project (PEP). He is also working as an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland. Previously, Dr Smith has worked with the Center for Economic Research in Pakistan (CERP).
His research interests are in development, economic history, and political economy. Dr Smith’s primary work studies the impact of climate change on the labour markets. Moreover, his working paper focuses on land concentration and long-run development in the frontier United States.
Dr Smith completed his PhD in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He also received his bachelor’s degree in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 2014, Dr Smith was awarded the Graduate Research Fellowship by the National Science Foundation.
corybsmith@gmail.com
Associate Professor, Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, LUMS
fsher@lums.edu.pk
Falak Sher
Associate Professor, Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, LUMS
Dr. Falak Sher is currently working as an Associate Professor (tenured) at the Department of Chemistry, SBA School of Science and Engineering (SBASSE), LUMS. Before joining LUMS in October 2008, he was a faculty member at the Pakistan Institute of Engineering and Applied Sciences (PIEAS), Nilore, Islamabad. Dr. Sher completed his PhD degree in Chemistry from the University of Cambridge, UK, in 2005. Prior to this, he received his MS Nuclear Engineering degree from the PIEAS (2nd position) in 1999 and M.Sc. Chemistry degree from the Institute of Chemistry, University of the Punjab in 1996. Dr. Sher also gained the Postdoctoral Research Experience on two different occasions from the University of Edinburgh (2005) and the University of Cambridge (2007-2008). His research has been published in reputed international journals like Nature, Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS), Angewandte Chemie International Edition, Chemistry of Materials, Inorganic Chemistry, Physical Review B etc.
Dr. Sher’s research group focuses on synthesis and characterization of functional transition metal oxides with interesting properties and applications. Typically, we investigate perovskite oxides (ABO3) for their potential applications in spintronics, thermoelectric devices, solid oxide fuel cells (SOFC) and photocatalysis for environmental remediation. Samples are synthesized by the conventional solid state chemistry and other soft chemistry methods, and characterized by the powder X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) etc. Physical properties such as magnetic, electronic transport, thermal transport etc. are measured by the available facilities at SBASSE and through collaborations with various national and international research groups. Properties of these materials are correlated with their chemical nature and crystal structures, and various strategies are devised to fine tune and optimize their properties.xoxo
fsher@lums.edu.pk
Assistant Professor, Lahore School of Economics
farahz3@gmail.com
Farah Said
Assistant Professor
Dr. Farah Said is currently an Assistant Professor at the Lahore School of Economics and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in Economics and Business.
In her work, Dr Said uses field and lab experiments to study the dynamics of poverty and gender in LMICs. Her current research investigates the effectiveness of community engagement and inclusive education in improving learning outcomes and psychosocial skills of students; the role that peer pressure and agency in the household can have on individual decision making; and the role of aspirations in motivating female labor force participation. She is also investigating the role of behavioral interventions in sustainability of alternative energy sources in rural settings, and of behavioral biases that influence demand for credit and saving in low income households.
Dr. Said has a Ph.D. in Economics from Lahore School of Economics, MSc. in Financial Economics from the University of Oxford and BSc (Hons.) in Economics from the Lahore University of Management Sciences.
farahz3@gmail.com
PhD candidate, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), UK
fizzah.sajjad@gmail.com
Fizzah Sajjad
PhD candidate
Fizzah Sajjad is a PhD candidate at the Department of Geography and Environment, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). She is an urban planner with nine years of research and project management experience. She previously worked as Director Research and Policy at the Mahbub ul Haq Research Centre. Her research interests focus on questions of land, housing, transport, and the politics of infrastructure development. She has worked on affordable housing development, gender equity in transport planning, and dispossession in rapidly urbanizing cities of the Global South. Fizzah holds a Masters in City Planning from MIT, with a specialization in International Development Planning.
fizzah.sajjad@gmail.com
Associate Professor, Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering
ihsan.qazi@lums.edu.pk
Ihsan Ayyub Qazi
Associate Professor
Dr. Ihsan Ayyub Qazi is an Associate Professor and the Chair of the Department of Computer Science at SBASSE, LUMS. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Pittsburgh, USA in 2010 and his BSc. (Hons) degree from LUMS with a double major in Computer Science and Mathematics in 2005. He was a Visiting Research Scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2017. Previously, he has also held positions at the Center for Advanced Internet Architectures, Australia and BBN Technologies, USA.
He is a recipient of the prestigious Google Faculty Research Award for his work on making the Web faster in the developing world. He is also a co-recipient of the prestigious Facebook Integrity Foundational Research Award in 2019 and 2020 for his work on combating misinformation on social media. His research interests are in networked systems, ICT for development, online privacy, and public policy. His research works have appeared in the most prestigious networking conferences and journals such as ACM SIGCOMM and IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking. His work on Facebook’s Free Basics platform won the best paper award at ACM SIGCOMM CCR in 2018. He is regularly invited to deliver seminars at leading Universities and companies such as MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, CMU, Google, Microsoft Research, and Facebook among others.
ihsan.qazi@lums.edu.pk
Associate Professor of Sociology and Associate Dean at the School of Social Sciences, Singapore Management University
ijlalnaqvi@smu.edu.sg
Ijlal Naqvi
Associate Professor of Sociology and Associate Dean at the School of Social Sciences, Singapore Management University
Ijlal Naqvi is an Associate Professor of Sociology and Associate Dean (Curriculum and Teaching) at the School of Social Sciences of Singapore Management University. He studies governance and development in the Global South, using infrastructure as a lens on state-building and the citizen’s engagement with the state on an everyday basis. His book Access to Power: Electricity and the Infrastructural State in Pakistan is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. Ijlal’s research has been published in Energy Research and Social Science, Journal of Development Studies, Urban Studies, Journal of Democracy, and Current Sociology. Ijlal earned his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
ijlalnaqvi@smu.edu.sg
Ph.D candidate in Applied Economics, Cornell University
m.rehman@lums.edu.pk
Maha Rehman
Ph.D candidate in Applied Economics, Cornell University
An economist, Maha has extensive experience in designing and evaluating programs, products and policies to improve resource allocation, service delivery, welfare and impact. Her research is at the intersection of development, health and behavioral economics. She undertakes field experiments in partnership with governments and non-governmental organizations in South Asia.
She works closely with local research firms and universities. She enjoys carefully collating novel and large datasets that are necessary to answer the questions at hand. From 2020-2022, she actively engaged in a multi-pronged analytical response to COVID in Pakistan. Prior to that, she set up the Analytics Wing at CERP that is focused on embedding data in the decisions and operations of private and public sector companies to increase efficiency, impact and profit.
She has also led research experiments at CERP and at the World Bank in the fields of education, public finance, and governance. She combines her coursework in economics with her interest in entrepreneurship. She has also served as the Director of Policy at the Mahbub-ul-Haq Research Centre at LUMS and a faculty member in the LUMS Economics Department.
m.rehman@lums.edu.pk
Assistant Professor at the Department of International Development, London School of Economics
m.shami@lse.ac.uk
Mahvish Shami
Assistant Professor at the Department of International Development, London School of Economics
Mahvish Shami is an Assistant Professor at the Department of International Development, London School of Economics. She has been a visiting research fellow at the School of Advance International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, and at Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford University.
Her research interests focus on the impact of unequal power relations – particularly clientelism – on the welfare of the poor. Dr. Shami’s current research focuses on poor citizens’ access to justice. She explores the barriers they face when accessing formal dispute resolution bodies. While the current literature looks at the institutional underpinnings of these restrictions, I argue that a major hurdle in developing countries comes in the form of social barriers, stemming from the presence of clientelist networks.
After completing her Ph.D. from the LSE, Dr. Shami did a Post-Doctoral fellowship at the Institute of Food and Resource Economics, Copenhagen University, and subsequently was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the LSE.
m.shami@lse.ac.uk
Research Fellow, ODI Europe
m.sarwar@odi.org
Moizza Sarwar
Research Fellow, ODI Europe
Moizza B Sarwar’s main area of work is social policy, with a focus on the political economy of the design, implementation and delivery of social protection policies and service delivery (in education and health) for vulnerable populations in low- and middle-income countries.
Moizza has over 11 years of experience in managing, undertaking and publishing cutting-edge qualitative research projects. Most recently, she has been working on research to advance the ‘leave no one behind’ agenda, by evaluating national policy systems and programmes on their sensitivity to marginalised populations in Pakistan, Nepal, Philippines, Kenya, Ghana, South Africa and Lesotho. Her research data is gathered through in-depth fieldwork and in-country focus group discussions with vulnerable populations in rural, peri-urban and urban settings and carrying out elite interviews with key politicians and civil servants as well as analysis of secondary quantitative and qualitative data. Moizza holds a PhD in Social Policy from the University of Oxford.
m.sarwar@odi.org
Assistant Professor at Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS
farooqn@lums.edu.pk
Muhammad Farooq Naseer
Assistant Professor at Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS
Muhammad Farooq Naseer is an Assistant Professor at Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS. Dr. Naseer is a development economist with interests in education, human development, and political economy.
Dr. Naseer’s work often requires the use of empirical methods with rich micro-data from household and community surveys to study issues ranging from poverty and vocational skills to political competition and learning outcomes in schools. He is actively engaged in several research collaborations with policy impact and continues to present his work at international as well as local academic and policy forums.
Dr. Naseer is a Research Fellow at the Center for Economic Research in Pakistan (CERP) and an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Development and Economic Alternatives (IDEAS). He is also a member of the Econometric Society, European Economic Association, and the Consortium for Development Policy Research (CDPR). Additionally, Dr. Naseer has served as a member of the technical committee of experts advising the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics on the design and execution of the Population Census 2017.
Dr. Naseer received his Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University.
farooqn@lums.edu.pk
Assistant Professor at the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, SSE, LUMS
m_shoaib@lums.edu.pk
Muhammad Shoaib
Assistant Professor at the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, SSE, LUMS
Muhammad Shoaib is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, SSE, LUMS.
His research work is focused on but is not limited to electrochemical energy storage, study of crystal structure, and electrochemical reaction mechanisms study. His research work has been published in several reputed international journals like Advanced Energys Materials, Chemical Society Reviews, Nano Energy, Angwandte Chemie, etc.
In 2010, he moved to Linnaeus University, Sweden for Engineering Management courses, and in 2012, he started a fully funded MS-Ph.D from Sungkyunkwan University, South Korea. After completing his Ph.D., he worked as a Post-Doc in the same department for 1 year. During his Ph.D., Shoaib won the Samsung Humantech award and DOES (Department of Energy Science, SKKU) fellowship award for his excellent research achievement.
m_shoaib@lums.edu.pk
Assistant Professor of Political Science, Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, Albany-State University of New York (SUNY)
niloufersiddiqui@gmail.com
Niloufer Siddiqui
Assistant Professor of Political Science
Niloufer Siddiqui is an assistant professor of political science at the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy, at Albany-State University of New York (SUNY). She is also a Nonresident Fellow at the Stimson Center. Her research interests include political violence, political behavior, the politics of religion and ethnicity, voters and foreign policy, and the politics of South Asia. Her work has been published in a number of political science journals, she has a co-edited volume on political parties in Pakistan published by Georgetown University Press, and a book on political violence forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. She previously worked at the International Crisis Group and the International Organization for Migration in Islamabad and the American Civil Liberties Union in New York. Dr. Niloufer has a Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University, an M.A. in International Relations from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and a B.A. in English from Haverford College.
niloufersiddiqui@gmail.com
Associate Professor at the Syed Ahsan Ali and Syed Maratib Ali School of Education at LUMS
razia.sadik@lums.edu.pk
Razia Iram Sadik
Associate Professor at the Syed Ahsan Ali and Syed Maratib Ali School of Education at LUMS
Razia Iram Sadik is an Associate Professor at the Syed Ahsan Ali and Syed Maratib Ali School of Education at LUMS. Her areas of practice have been primarily in higher education program building and research, teacher education, and curatorial practice in both Pakistan and the United States.
Dr. Sadik’s research interests are in arts-based research, critical pedagogy, arts higher education, community arts curriculum, and critical curatorial practice. Specifically, she investigates reflexivity in the learning of adults, particularly artists and teachers at work, through arts-based, narrative and autoethnographic modes of research. Her curatorial work aims to extend art as an inquiry to communities through the gallery and museum education. Her current research is on the dynamics of institutional cultures and ideologies in arts higher education in Pakistan and the feasibility of critical pedagogy therein. She has published both in the areas of curatorial practice and art education using experimental modes of arts-based research and writing.
Dr. Sadik received her doctorate in Art Education from Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, United States.
razia.sadik@lums.edu.pk
Assistant professor, Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences
sanval.nasim@lums.edu.pk
Sanval Nasim
Assistant professor
Dr. Sanval Nasim is an assistant professor of economics at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS). His primary research field is environmental and natural resource economics. His research work includes behavioural experiments on air pollution forecasts, information-based pollution mitigation interventions, optimal control modelling of water resources, and cost-benefit analysis of clean technology adoption. He obtained his PhD in environmental and natural resource economics from the University of California, Riverside in 2015 and a BA in economics-mathematics and in history from Colby College in 2008.
sanval.nasim@lums.edu.pk
Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics, University of Virginia
sa8ey@virginia.edu
Shan Aman-Rana
Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics, University of Virginia
Shan Aman-Rana is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics, University of Virginia. She completed a Ph.D. in Economics from the London School of Economics. Before her Ph.D., she worked as a Pakistan Administrative Services civil servant.
Her research focuses on topics in Development Economics, Organisational Economics, and Public Economics.
sa8ey@virginia.edu
Assistant Professor of History in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS
shayan.rajani@lums.edu.pk
Shayan Rajani
Assistant Professor of History in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS
Shayan Rajani is an Assistant Professor of History in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, LUMS. His research focuses on early modern South Asia and the Mughal world. In particular, he studies the region of Sindh. This includes examining the role of leaving legacies in constructing the individual and the world, following the material and gendered choices that contribute to producing, sustaining, and transmuting these two interrelated assemblages across the rise and fall of the Mughal Empire.
His first book project, “Leaving Legacies: Making Individual and the World in Early Modern South Asia,” examines the enterprise of assembling texts, monuments, and children as a concerted effort to leave memorials for posterity. In doing so, it investigates the intellectual, social, and material history of the individual in South Asia, specifically in Sindh, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.
He received his doctoral degree in History from Tufts University.
shayan.rajani@lums.edu.pk
Associate Professor at the Shaikh Ahmad Hassan School of Law, LUMS
sikander@lums.edu.pk
Sikander Ahmed Shah
Associate Professor at the Shaikh Ahmad Hassan School of Law, LUMS
Sikander Ahmed Shah is an Associate Professor at the Shaikh Ahmad Hassan School of Law, LUMS.
Professor Shah’s teaching and research interests are focused on Public International Law, International Human Rights Law, International Humanitarian Law, Corporate Governance, and Constitutional Design.
He obtained a B.A. in Economics and a Juris Doctorate (Cum Laude) from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He has held visiting faculty positions at the Temple Law School, the Wayne State Law School, and the University of Michigan Law School and holds the position of adjunct faculty at the Maurer School of Law, Indiana University Bloomington. Professor Shah served as the Legal Advisor to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, while he was on sabbatical from 2012-2013.
sikander@lums.edu.pk
Institute of Development Studies (IDS), University of Sussex, UK
s.nazneen@ids.ac.uk
Sohela Nazneen
Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), University of Sussex, UK
Dr. Sohela Nazneen is a fellow at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), University of Sussex, UK. She leads IDS’ work on gender and politics and convenes IDS’ flagship MA on Gender and Development. Sohela’s work largely focuses on the politics of pro gender equity policy making, women’s empowerment, and feminist movements in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Sohela has published on these issues, including in World Development, Contemporary South Asia, Studies in Family Planning, Women’s Studies International Forum, Conflict Security and Development, Gender and Development. Her recent publication is a special issue on feminist protest and politics (Gender and Development, Vol 29). Sohela has worked as a consultant for FAO, SDC, UNwomen, and The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation– designing development interventions, and conducting policy analysis and programme evaluations.
s.nazneen@ids.ac.uk
Assistant Professor of Political Science, Stanford University
soledadp@stanford.edu
Soledad Artiz Prillaman
Assistant Professor of Political Science
Soledad Artiz Prillaman is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. Her research lies at the intersections of comparative political economy, development, and gender, with a focus on South Asia. Specifically, her research addresses questions such as what are the political consequences of development and development policies, particularly for women’s political behavior? How are minorities, specifically women, democratically represented and where do inequalities in political engagement persist and how are voter demands translated into policy and governance? In answering these questions, she utilizes mixed methods, including field experiments, surveys, and in-depth qualitative fieldwork. She received her Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University in 2017 and a B.A. in Political Science and Economics from Texas A&M University in 2011.soledadp@stanford.edu
Assistant Professor, Syed Ahsan Ali and Syed Maratib Ali School of Education
soufia.siddiqi@lums.edu.pk
Soufia Siddiqi
Assistant Professor
Soufia Siddiqi is Director Research at Mahbub ul Haq Research Centre(MHRC), and Assistant Professor at LUMS School of Education. She is a Rhodes Scholar and specializes in qualitative research methods as well as education policy and curriculum design. On the implementation side, she applies design ethnography, process mapping, and data to understanding what makes policy decisions tick (or not). Previously, Soufia was Technical Advisor to the School Education Department, Punjab and a member of the Punjab Examination Commission, where she led the Technical Committee for the province’s 2019 Assessment Policy Framework
During her time as Technical Advisor to the Secretary of School Education in the Punjab, Soufia worked on developing a 5-year roadmap for the province’s most urgent reform needs, paying special attention to the need for a coherent learning outcomes dataset as well as the political economy of teachers in the public education system. The latter is an area of research she is now probing in greater detail in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa context in conjunction with the RISE Programme Political Economy (Adoption) Team at the University of Pennsylvania. Soufia is also part of a 3-member team investigating the effects of different delivery models on systemic efficiencies for education in two of Pakistan’s largest provinces. Prior to this, Soufia led the Technical Committee at the Punjab Examination Commission to write the province’s first Assessment Policy Framework and also advised Alif Ailaan, Pakistan’s first education advocacy campaign. She is working on her first manuscript on notions of belonging amongst elite young men in public education in Pakistan.
soufia.siddiqi@lums.edu.pk
Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, LUMS
suleman.shahid@lums.edu.pk
Suleman Shahid
Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, LUMS
Suleman Shahid is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, LUMS. Dr. Shahid directs the ‘Computer-Human Interaction and Social Experience Lab’ (CHISEL).
His research interests include assistive technologies (mobile apps and VR/AR systems) to enhance the quality of life of persons with disabilities (e.g. autism, dyslexia, visual impairment) and older adults, educational technologies for children (child-computer interaction), and affective computing. More recently he has become interested in ‘information and communication technologies for development’ (ICT4D) where he takes a multidisciplinary approach to designing interventions in the areas of education and health. Since 2009, he has been offering consultancy and training services in the areas of design thinking and user experience (UX) design and strategy.
Dr. Shahid received his Ph.D. in human-computer interaction in 2011 from Tilburg University, the Netherlands, and PDEng (Professional Doctorate in Engineering) in 2007 in the User System Interaction program from the Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands.
suleman.shahid@lums.edu.pk
Assistant Professor, Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences
tania.saeed@lums.edu.pk
Tania Saeed
Assistant Professor
Dr Tania Saeed is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at LUMS. As a sociologist of education she is trained in qualitative research methods, with expertise in education and securitization, citizenship and social justice. Her work ranges from exploring Islamophobia and securitization in the context of the UK, to examining the increasing securitization of education in Pakistan. She is the author of Islamophobia and Securitization. Religion, Ethnicity and the Female Voice (2016, Palgrave Macmillan) and the co-author of Youth and the National Narrative. Education, Terrorism and the Security State in Pakistan (2020, Bloomsbury).
Her on-going research explores the politics of identity and religious ideology through the teaching of language and literature subjects in refugee, government and low cost private schools in Pakistan. She is also collaborating on research with colleagues at the University College London (UCL) to examine the role of historiography in the teaching of history in schools in Punjab. As a Co-Investigator on a GCRF Development Grant with colleagues from the University of Bristol she is supporting civil society initiatives towards using digital media in the teaching of citizenship with a focus on education and peace.
Saeed has a DPhil in Education from the University of Oxford, where she was a Wingate Scholar (2011-12) and an HEC scholar (2008-11), and an MSc in Gender, Development and Globalization from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). She is the elected Chair (2019-21) of the South Asia Special Interest Group (SA SIG) at the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES), US.
tania.saeed@lums.edu.pk
Associate Professor of Economics, University of Bristol
zahra.siddique@bristol.ac.uk
Zahra Siddique
Associate Professor of Economics, University of Bristol
Zahra Siddique is an Associate Professor in Economics at the University of Bristol. She has previously worked at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn (Germany) and continues to be affiliated with the Institute as a Research Fellow. She completed her MA and Ph.D. in Economics from Northwestern University in the US and BSc Honors in Economics from the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Pakistan.
Her research interests are in micro-econometrics, labor economics, and development economics.
zahra.siddique@bristol.ac.uk -
T-Z
Assistant Professor, Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences
adeel.tariq@lums.edu.pk
Adeel Tariq
Assistant Professor
Dr. Adeel Tariq is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. A Fulbright Scholar, he holds a PhD in Economics from Binghamton University, MSc in Economics from the Lahore University of Management Sciences, an MBA from the Lahore School of Economics and a BSc (Hons) in Economics & Management from the University of London. His research interests include the analysis of firm-level productivity and efficiency, the role of information frictions in emerging markets, housing affordability in developing countries and labor market dynamics.
adeel.tariq@lums.edu.pk
Assistant Professor of Sociology at Western Washington University
zaidir@wwu.edu
Batool Zaidi
Assistant Professor of Sociology at Western Washington University
Batool Zaidi is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Western Washington University. She obtained her PhD in Sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in May 2019. Her research addresses gender inequality in the global South through the analysis of health outcomes, cultural norms, and development projects. Her three-article dissertation examined the relationship between gender inequality, son preference and child outcomes through analysis of family contexts.
Prior to completing her PhD, Batool was at the Population Council’s Islamabad office, where she worked on projects focusing on family planning, girls education, maternal health, the demographic dividend, and sex-selective abortions. She has a master’s degree in Population and Development from the London School of Economics and a bachelor’s degree in Economics from Mount Holyoke College.
zaidir@wwu.edu
Professor of Economics at the American University of Sharjah
jyounas@aus.edu
Javed Younas
Professor of Economics
Dr. Javed Younas is a Professor of Economics at the American University of Sharjah. He is also affiliated with the Centre for Economic Research in Pakistan in Lahore. In his previous academic/research positions, he has been a Visiting Scholar at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship & Public Affairs, Aman Research Fellow at Harvard University, Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, and faculty member at Central Michigan University.
His research focus lies in the areas of the political economy of conflicts and foreign assistance, international trade, energy economics, behavioral and experimental economics. He has published a number of papers in well-known refereed journals. His policy work has appeared and featured in national and international outlets. He has also secured several research grants. His professional information can be viewed at https://sites.google.com/site/javedyounas
jyounas@aus.edu
Associate Director at DevLab and Research Scientist at the Department of Economics, Duke University
katherine.vyborny@duke.edu
Kate Vyborny
Research Scientist at the Department of Economics, Duke University
Kate Vyborny is the Associate Director of the DevLab at Duke and Research Scientist in the Department of Economics at Duke University. Dr. Vyborny completed her D.Phil. (Ph.D.) in the Department of Economics at the University of Oxford, where she was affiliated with the Centre for the Study of African Economies. She is also a visiting faculty member at the Lahore School of Economics and at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, and a Fellow at the Center for Economic Research in Pakistan and the Consortium for Development Policy Research in Pakistan.
Previously, Dr. Vyborny has worked on research and policy outreach on foreign aid, trade, and development at the Center for Global Development and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC.
katherine.vyborny@duke.edu
Dr Waseem is currently working as an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Manchester.
mazhar.waseem@manchester.ac.uk
Mazhar Waseem
Associate Professor
Dr Waseem is currently working as an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Manchester. Before pursuing his research interest, his primary time was spent serving in Pakistan’s civil service as a part of the Custom and Excise department.
Dr Waseem is affiliated with Institute of Fiscal Studies, London, Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), London and Centre for Economic Research in Pakistan (CERP), Pakistan.
His research interest lies in the areas of public finance, public economics and development. His recent research exploits discontinuities created by tax systems and policy reforms to study behavioural responses to taxation and their implications for optimal tax policy in law enforcement capacity environments. Dr Waseem is also interested in studying how informality affects modern broad-based taxes’ efficiency and compliance in developing countries.
Dr Mazhar Waseem holds a PhD degree in economics from the London School of Economics (LSE).
mazhar.waseem@manchester.ac.uk
Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at Lahore University of Management Sciences
momin.uppal@lums.edu.pk
Momin Uppal
Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at Lahore University of Management Sciences
Momin Uppal is a tenured associate professor of electrical engineering at Lahore University of Management Sciences. He received his Ph.D. and MS in Electrical Engineering from Texas A&M University in 2010 and 2006, respectively. Earlier, he received his BS in Electronic Engineering with the highest distinction from GIK Institute of Engineering Sciences, Pakistan in 2002. At LUMS, he serves as the director of the Advanced Communications (AdCom) Lab and the Smart Data Systems and Applications (SDSA) Lab. He has published over 50 papers in leading IEEE Journals and Conferences and has two US patents to his name. During his time at LUMS, he has secured research funding from national and international agencies including Ignite (formerly National ICT R&D Fund), Higher Education Commission (HEC) of Pakistan, National Instruments, and United Kingdom’s Grand Challenges Research Fund (GCRF). He is currently leading an Rs. 220 million multi-PI project from the HEC that broadly deals with the use of technology and data-driven decision-making to save our cities. His research interests lie in urban computing, statistical signal processing, machine learning for wireless communications, back-scatter communications, and environmental sensing using radio signals.
Momin is the recipient of the LUMS’ Vice Chancellor’s Teaching Excellence Award 2021 (university-wide award), and the LUMS’ Department of Electrical Engineering Distinguished Teaching Award 2019. He has also been nominated by LUMS for the HEC Best University Teacher Award 2021 (national award).
momin.uppal@lums.edu.pk
Dr. Muhammad Fareed Zaffar received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Duke University in 2005 and the BSc. (Hons) degree from LUMS with a major in Computer Science and minor in Mathematics in 1999.
fareed.zaffar@lums.edu.pk
Muhammad Fareed Zafar
Professor
Dr. Muhammad Fareed Zaffar received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Duke University in 2005 and the BSc. (Hons) degree from LUMS with a major in Computer Science and minor in Mathematics in 1999.
His primary research interests are in the areas of security, privacy and Internet measurement. His recent work focuses on social networks, online fraud and cybercrime and his previous work looked at enabling public sector reform through technology and the use of information and communication technologies for development.
Dr. Fareed is particularly interested in the use of program analysis techniques to make software efficient, compact and secure.
fareed.zaffar@lums.edu.pk
Associate Professor, Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, LUMS
tahir@lums.edu.pk
Muhammad Tahir
Associate Professor, Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, LUMS
Dr. Muhammad Tahir received the Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering in 2007 from the University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, and the Master of Science in Electronic Engineering in 2009 from Politecnico di Torino, Italy.
In April 2013, he obtained his Ph.D. degree also from Politecnico di Torino, Italy in the field of Electronics and Telecommunication. His research activity is focused on the development of novel algorithms for satellite navigation receiver technology.
His research interests include receiver baseband signal processing algorithm design and development, Bayesian signal processing, detection and estimation theory, channel coding in communication networks, machine learning, and sequential Monte Carlo methods.
tahir@lums.edu.pk
Assistant Professor at Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, LUMS.
muhammad.zaheer@lums.edu.pk
Muhammad Zaheer
Assistant Professor at the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering
Dr. Muhammad Zaheer is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering. He is a member of the Royal Society of Chemistry and the American Chemical Society. His research and teaching interests include environmental and sustainable chemistry. Dr. Zaheer’s research focuses on developing catalysts for renewable energy, green chemicals from biomass, and environmental remediation
muhammad.zaheer@lums.edu.pk
Assistant Professor, Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering
murtaza.taj@lums.edu.pk
Murtaza Taj
Assistant Professor
Dr. Murtaza Taj earned his Ph.D. and M.Sc. degrees in electronic engineering and computer science from the Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), United Kingdom, in 2009 and 2005, respectively. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor and Faculty Director of the Computer Vision and Graphics Lab and Technology for People Initiative at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, Pakistan. He is also an adjunct faculty at the Ontario Tech University, Canada. His research interest lies in the area of Computer Vision, Graphics and Image Processing. His recent work involves satellite image processing for automatic extraction of socio-economic indicators.
murtaza.taj@lums.edu.pk
Project Director of the National Incubation Center, LUMS
nauman.zaffar@lums.edu.pk
Nauman Ahmad Zaffar
Project Director of the National Incubation Center, LUMS
Nauman Ahmad Zaffar is the Project Director of the National Incubation Center and part of the Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, LUMS. He joined LUMS in 2010 as a full-time faculty member in the Department of Electrical Engineering. He is part of the LUMS Energy Optimization Committee and is working on establishing a research base at SSE in the area of Power Electronics, Smart Grids, and Renewable Energy.
His current areas of interest include dc/dc converters for Solar PV applications, dc/ac inverters for grid-tie distributed energy sources, and VFDs for industrial, off-grid, and automotive applications. His areas of work include understanding business needs, proposing and designing solutions, and carrying out the development, rollout, and support lifecycle of the solutions in the domains of Electric Utilities, Telecom, and Manufacturing. He has worked with Techlogix to establish and extend practice areas of Business Process Management, ERP implementation, Enterprise Architecture, and Software Product Engineering
Nauman Ahmad Zaffar received his BS (1990) and MS (1991) in Electrical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.
nauman.zaffar@lums.edu.pk
Assistant Professor at Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, LUMS.
rafiullah@lums.edu.pk
Rafi Ullah
Assistant Professor at Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, LUMS.
Before joining LUMS Physics Department Dr. Rafi Ullah was a post-doctoral staff scientist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, CA, USA.
He has a general interest in the computational and theoretical study of fundamental as well as applied problems within condensed matter physics. Particularly, the quantum simulation of electron dynamics in response to strong non-adiabatic external perturbations in various contexts such as radiation damage, non-adiabatic coupling of molecular vibrations with the substrate electrons (metal surfaces), defect dynamics, and plasmonics. He is also interested in studying matter under extreme (temperature and pressure) conditions using first-principles molecular dynamics and metadynamics. More recently he has been learning how to apply machine learning tools to material science problems.
He is also interested in the development and integration of numerical techniques into the pedagogical teaching of physics.
rafiullah@lums.edu.pk
Associate Professor, Syed Ahsan Ali and Syed Maratib Ali School of Education
tayyaba.tamim@lums.edu.pk
Tayyaba Tamim
Associate Professor
Dr. Tamim has her PhD from University of Cambridge as a fully funded RECOUP scholarship, and MPhil RSLE (Research in Second Language Education Across Cultures) from Cambridge, UK as a British Council Chevening scholar. In addition, she also has an MA ELT from Kinnaird College for Women University and MA English from the University of Punjab, Pakistan. Dr Tamim has led several funded research projects with national and international partners, including those with USAID, British council and the World Bank. She has also published and presented research papers at a number of national and international forums. Her work covers issues of social justice, equity and inclusivity in education with specific reference to languages in education, language policy, gender and caste.
She is currently Associate Professor at the School of Education, and the faculty lead for the Pedagogical Partnership Programme at LUMS. Earlier she was Head Faculty of Social Sciences at Lahore School of Economics. She also worked as Director Academics at SZABIST, overseeing work across its five campuses (Karachi, Islamabad, Larkana, Hyderabad and Dubai). While at SZABIST she set up and later led the Department of Education.
tayyaba.tamim@lums.edu.pk
Associate Professor, Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences
waqar.zaidi@lums.edu.pk
Waqar Zaidi
Associate Professor
Dr. Waqar Zaidi is Associate Professor of History at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at LUMS. His research focuses on the relationship(s) between technology and international relations in the twentieth century. Current research interests include scientific and technological internationalism, aviation, atomic energy, arms control, and A.I. He has published across a wide range of history and STS journals, and has a book forthcoming with Cambridge University Press, titled Technological Internationalism and World Order’: ‘Aviation and Atomic Energy, 1920-50.
Waqar Zaidi has an MSc and PhD in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine from Imperial College London, and a BA(Hons) in Physics from the University of Oxford. He is a Research Affiliate at the Governance of A.I. Program at the Future of Humanities Institute at the University of Oxford, and a Research Collaborator at the Research Institute for the History of Global Arms Transfer, Meiji University. He is also a member of the DHST Historical Commission on Science, Technology and Diplomacy and of the Centre for the Study of Internationalism at Birkbeck College, London. He is also Associate Editor of the interdisciplinary open access journal Humanities and Social Science Communications.
At LUMS Waqar is Director of the Office of International Studies, and teaches a variety of undergraduate courses in global and European history, and in the history of science and technology.
waqar.zaidi@lums.edu.pk
Associate Professor at the Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, LUMS
zartash@lums.edu.pk
Zartash Afzal Uzmi
Associate Professor at the Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, LUMS
Zartash Afzal Uzmi is an Associate Professor at the Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, LUMS.
His graduate research focused on Multi-user Detection for CDMA systems for which he devised schemes and algorithms for the practical implementation of multi-user detectors. He has held positions at Nokia Research center, Bell Laboratories, and Hewlett Packard Company. He has been part of the LUMS faculty since 2002. At LUMS, his current research is focused on scalable and efficient network design and measurements for wide-area deployments as well as data center networks.
Dr. Uzmi received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 2002.
zartash@lums.edu.pk
