Murad Ali

Biography

Born in a small village in northern Pakistan's Mardan district, Dr Murad Ali received his earlier education at his village primary school and then went to complete his Matric/High school at another government school in a nearby village. Following that, he studied in Govt. Postgraduate College Mardan and then completed his BA at the historic Islamia College Peshawar. For his MA, he bid adieu to his province and shifted to Islamabad, Pakistan's capital where he completed his Masters. After joining the University of Malakand as a lecturer, Murad was awarded MS-leading to PhD overseas scholarship by the Higher Education Commission (HEC)/Govt. of Pakistan because of his outstanding academic record and after qualifying a national country-wide competition. This landed him at Massey University, New Zealand where he completed his MS and PhD in 2012. Among more than 60 HEC-funded students, he was the first Pakistani scholar to complete his doctoral studies from Massey University. In 2014, Dr Murad won a highly competitive research grant worth US$ 20,000 (PKR 2 million) under the Pakistan Strategy Support Programme (PSSP) funded by USAID. In 2016, he won Germany’s highly competitive and most prestigious fellowship awarded by Alexander von Humboldt (AvH) foundation and remained affiliated with the German Development Institute/Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE) at Bonn as postdoctoral research fellow for two years. Since the inception of Humboldt fellowship in 1952, Dr Murad is the first Pakistani who has been awarded this fellowship in the social sciences category. He has published papers in peer reviewed journals of high repute and has presented papers in conferences in Argentine, New Zealand, Australia, Malaysia, Japan, China, South Korea, Kenya, Denmark, Norway, Germany, UK and USA and has won several research grants from reputed international organizations including Massey University NZ, the Australian National University (ANU) and United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

Education

PhD, Massey University, New Zealand

Areas of Research / Professional Expertise

Dr Murad’s main research interests are aid and development effectiveness, political economy of foreign aid, the new aid paradigm, the 2030 Agenda and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in the context of South-South Cooperation and its synergy with the SDGs (particularly China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and its potential contribution to the SDGs in Pakistan). He has been contributing regular columns to the op-ed pages of one of Pakistan’s leading English newspapers, The News International. His columns can be accessed at https://www.thenews.com.pk/writer/dr-murad-ali

Personal Interests

Reading and writing, playing and watching cricket, traveling and visiting new places, watching good movies, spending time with my family

Books