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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

Tahir Andrabi is a Professor of Economics at Pomona College. Professor Andrabi is a graduate of Swarthmore College and holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He teaches classes in principles, economic development, game theory and international economics. He has been a visiting scholar at MIT, an economic research associate at LSE and a consultant for the World Bank. He was a member of the tax and macroeconomic committees of the economic advisory board of the government of Pakistan in 1999-2000.

He is the principal investigator on Leaps Project, which received a grant to study the quality of primary education in rural Punjab. In 2007, his work on religious education in Pakistan received the George Bereday Award for the best paper published in the Comparative Education Review in 2006 from the Comparative and International Education Society. A website he co-founded to help coordinate relief in the aftermath of the October 2005 earthquake was awarded the Stockholm Challenge Award (2006) for the best ICT project in the public administration category.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dr. Laila Bushra recently finished a Master of Public Policy and Management (MPPM) from the University of Melbourne, and is currently working there as a tutor. Dr. Bushra also taught as 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 concerning the socio-economic and political changes associated with neoliberalism and globalization.

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.

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.

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.