Biography

I come from a middle-class family with nine siblings. My father imbibed the value of education in all of us. Two of my professional achievements are a gold medal in my master’s and a Commonwealth PhD Scholarship for study in Canada. After a fellowship at the Naval Medical Center and Johns Hopkins University, I joined the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, US. My first publication from the NIH was selected for a Berson-Yalow Award by the American Society of Nuclear Medicine. I returned to Pakistan to join the recently established Aga Khan University. Here I developed a state-of-the-art functional immunology laboratory, the first of its kind in Pakistan. A research program in infectious diseases led to more than 100 papers on mycobacterial diseases in international journals. This work was recognised at institutional, national and international levels, with several prizes and awards, and I was listed among the top 20 most influential women scientists in the Muslim world in 2014.