Dean’s Fellowship Program

Manahil Huda is dedicated to exploring Pakistan's visual and material culture, driven by a passion for transformative design. Her focus is on leveraging innovative design methods, incorporating local materials and traditions to create positive impacts at individual and community levels. Engaged in social innovation, she merges Design for Social Impact and Systems Oriented Design, particularly emphasizing South Asia. With a wealth of teaching experience at Habib University, she actively contributes to academia and real-world design challenges through consultancy and industry projects. Currently pursuing an MSc in Product Service Systems Design at Politecnico di Milano, Italy, her studies concentrate on service design, systemic design, and design for social and public innovation.

Mahso Gichki is an accomplished scholar with an MSc in International Relations from the London School of Economics (LSE) and a BA in International Relations from King’s College London. With roles at the Society for International Development and the Pakistan Institute of International Affairs, she honed qualitative research and editing skills. As an Assistant Brand Manager Intern at Newell Brands, Mahso enhanced teamwork and communication by collaborating across EMEA countries. Her leadership shone during an NGO internship, managing a team for a library initiative. Alongside academic pursuits, she excelled in martial arts, presiding over clubs and earning accolades in Brazilian Jujitsu competitions. Published in Development, her paper explores transgender identities in Pakistan, India, and Iran. Fluent in Balochi, Urdu, and English, Mahso showcases diverse linguistic abilities alongside her multifaceted interests in poetry and sports.

Haniya Habib completed her master’s degree in Near Eastern Studies from New York University as a Falak Sufi scholar. Her degree program focused on the study of advanced language and comparative literature. Haniya’s research centers around narratives of resistance in South Asia and their representation in contemporary literature, photography, and film. Her master’s thesis analyzed photographic representations of forced disappearances in Kashmir and their relationship to the ongoing movement against state occupation. At Habib, Haniya plans to teach courses on South Asian literature, feminist theory, and visual studies.

He is an educator who will force you to think. With an aim to bring formal learning systems closer to the natural learning patterns of humans. His work in education over the last 5 years has been focused on working out how we think & learn and how we can get better at both. In pursuit of these answers, he has experimented on learners from the age of 6 to 60, from children on the street through LettuceBee Kids to professionals in formal classrooms at the Higher Education Commission, United States Education Foundation in Pakistan, and Air University. And have also co-founded and led the academic development of Scholarden, Pakistan’s first and only online platform to prepare for critical thinking on the GRE. All this work has, till date, led to a surprising answer: all of us think in the same way. In one way, it is unsurprising as well, considering that we all share some common elements in our design. That said, the journey to find this answer is not yet over. And there is a lot more work to be done to develop teaching & learning tools, systems, and institutions based on what I discover. This quest is what brings him to Habib University – to learn more about and experiment with unlocking the minds of his students – to train them in the Liberal Arts.

Ana Tawfiq Husain recently finished her Master’s in International Relations with a concentration in Middle East politics at King’s College London. Her dissertation explores how foreign interventions in Lebanon since 1989 (after the end of the 1975 Lebanese Civil War) have impacted sectarian politics. Specifically investigating the roles of Saudi Arabia, the United States, Israel, Syria and Iran in the post-civil war reconstruction of Lebanon, her research adopts a Gramscian approach to trace the cultivation of an ‘inverted’ and externally induced sectarian hegemony by adapting Antonio Gramsci’s concept of a ‘passive revolution.

A Fulbright Scholar, Areeba has a Masters in Electrical and Computer Engineering (2022), from Northeastern University. During her Masters, she worked at the Northeastern Field Robotics Lab where her research was primarily on designing a compact visual inertial odometry system for underwater ROVs. The aim of the project was to maintain navigation in visually compromised environments, like underwater, through IMU data. Moreover, low latency of IMU feed can be used in extreme case of emergency breaks or navigation around close-by obstructions. During her Masters, she was also selected for the SDU International Summer School at the University of Southern Denmark, to explore and participate in the cutting-edge research, on academic and industrial scale, in the field of robotics. In terms of industry experience, Areeba has worked in K-Electric from 2018-2020 as a Trainee Engineer followed by as an Assisstant Manager in the Project Department, where her team was overlooking the planning of all transmission-related projects in the entire city of Karachi.

Muzammil Patel is a Dean’s Fellow and Lecturer in the Comparative Humanities Department. He is interested in the political history and intellectual thought of South Asia especially the intersection of Sufism and modern reformist movements in colonial India. Muzammil’s interest was sparked by his career in Islamic Banking of around 5 years, after which he went on to obtain a Masters in Muslim Cultures at the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilizations, London. His Master’s dissertation “Neo-Barelviyat: The Political Surge of Barelvis in Pakistan”, explored the resurgence of contemporary Barelvism in Pakistan with respect to intra-sectarianism, role of the state and reformation of their popular Sufi identity. Given his exemplary thesis work, Muzammil graduated the program with a Great Distinction.

Sana Rizwan Gondal is a Fulbright Scholar and has a Master’s degree in Urban and Environmental Planning (2022) from Arizona State University (MUEP). Sana graduated from ASU’s School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning as the Outstanding Graduate Student. This is the highest accolade of the program and is awarded by the official licensing body of urban planners in the US, the American Planning Association. She graduated with a perfect CGPA and as the leader of multiple graduate student organizations.

Abdullah is a Carnegie Mellon Computer Science Alumnus, who is passionate about producing and sharing great ideas with his students. He enjoys thinking about Computer Science Theory, especially the impossible and inexpressible, and did his Masters thesis in Descriptive Complexity Theory. He is involved in a range of out-of-class pedagogical activities including competitive programming, a Theoretical Computer Science reading circle, poetry reading circle, and adult literacy for underprivileged staff at the university. In his spare time, he likes reading philosophy, theology and literature and maintains an active personal dialogue with the Humanities.

I completed my Bachelors of Science in Economics and Mathematics from IBA with a CGPA 0f 3.78 and secured 4th position in a batch of more than 80 students. During my bachelors I secured scholarships to attend summer schools at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China and Bath Spa University in Bath, UK. I also managed multiple teaching assistantships and a research internship at IBA with Center for Business and Economic Research (CBER).