Dr. Mariam Chughtai has a Doctorate in Education (Ed.D.) from Harvard University specializing in Education Policy, Leadership and Instructional Practice. She has two masters degrees from Harvard University, in International Education Policy and in Education Policy and Management, and a Bachelors in Political Science from Rice University. As a teaching fellow, she taught Negotiations at Harvard Law School, Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School, along with several courses at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
As a student, she founded the Harvard Pakistan Student Group (HPSG) with a community of less than 20 students in 2009. Three years later, she handed over an organization with over 600 members having established HPSG as the first university-wide student organization recognized by Harvard University. These efforts trail-blazed the path for 30 other university-wise student groups to emerge in HPSG’s footsteps. She was a recipient of Graduate Scholarship Program Award, Jack Kent Cooke Foundation for 6 years from 2006 to 2013. She was awarded the Graduate Student Associate Fellowship at Harvard Mittal South Asia Institute from 2012 to 2014, and received the Georg-Eckert Institute for International Textbook Research Fellowship, Germany, in 2017.
Dr. Chughtai returned to her home country in 2015 after completing her higher education in the United States. As her first project, she co-founded the LUMS Syed Ahsan Ali & Syed Maratib Ali School of Education, with a vision for sustainable education reform in Pakistan. She is the founding Associate Dean of the school and currently an Assistant Professor there. In addition to her role at LUMS, Dr. Chughtai the in-region Pakistan Director for Harvard Mittal South Asia Institute. As part of her family business, she serves on the Board of Directors for Chughtai Lab, Pakistan's largest private healthcare network. She is now based in Lahore working on her forthcoming book on the politics of making and breaking identity through history textbooks in Pakistan.