Speakers

Adil Ajmal

Bio: Adil Ajmal serves as the Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Engineering of TenMarks Education, an Amazon Company. Mr. Ajmal is responsible for developing the technology behind TenMarks. He is an engineering leader with over 15 years of experience. He served in engineering leadership roles at multiple startups as well as public companies including Vice President of Engineering at Posterous, Inc. (acquired by Twitter), Director of Software Development - Homestead Division at Intuit, Head of Software Development and Operations for PhotoSite at United Online and Principal Consultant at Razorfish. Mr. Ajmal graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a BS in Computer Science. 

Shashi Buluswar

Bio: Dr. Shashi Buluswar is the founder and Exec. Director of LIGTT, the Institute for Globally Transformative Technologies, at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. LIGTT was launched in 2012, to develop technological breakthroughs for combating global poverty and related problems. Before creating LIGTT, Shashi was a Partner at Dalberg Global Development Advisors, where he served as a strategic advisor to a range of institutions in international development—NGOs, corporations, foundations, governments, social entrepreneurs, the UN, and the World Bank—on topics including health, agriculture, economic development, human rights, and climate change. Before joining Dalberg, he was an Associate Partner at McKinsey & Company. He holds a PhD from the University of Massachusetts in Robotics, and an MBA from Northwestern University. He also teaches international development at the University of California, Berkeley, and is writing a textbook on the topic. He recently made a critically acclaimed documentary film about the India-Pakistan conflict. Shashi was born and raised in India. 

Salman Humayun

Bio: Salman Humayun is the Executive Director of the Institute of Social and Policy Sciences (ISAPS), Islamabad.

Ameen Jan

Bio: Ameen Jan is the Founder and CEO of EDeQUAL, and serves as the Chairman of the Board. He has 20 years of experience as a management consultant and strategy advisor to leading companies, governments, and international organisations in Europe and the United States. His strengths in strategy development and execution have seen him successfully establish and grow a UK-based management consulting practice, Jan Consulting Ltd., that served government and private sector clients on strategy in emerging markets in Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America; and spearhead market entry strategy and implementation of a major European consumer goods company into Pakistan. Before establishing his management consulting practice, Ameen was a senior advisor at the UK Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, where he led ground-breaking policy and strategy work on managing international instability for the UK government. Prior to that he worked with McKinsey & Company in London, where he advised corporate clients across a range of industry sectors. Before that Ameen worked as an advisor at the United Nations in New York and in Africa. Ameen has an MBA from Stanford University, an MA in International Affairs from Tufts University, and a BA in Public Policy from Princeton University.

Umair Khan

Bio: Umair Khan is a serial entrepreneur, who most recently co-founded SecretBuilders, a virtual world for 5 to 14 year olds. Prior to founding SecretBuilders, Mr. Khan co-founded Clickmarks Inc., a Silicon Valley-based enterprise software company. Mr. Khan is also founder and chairman of Verisium, a Silicon Valley-based software testing tools company founded in 2004. Mr. Khan is also founder and director of Folio3, a Pakistan-based services company that focuses on providing offshore operations incubation to venture-backed startups. Prior to this, Mr. Khan was founder and chairman of Wordwalla Inc., a venture-backed company providing multilingual software solutions. Wordwalla was acquired in 2001 by Morisawa Corporation, a public company in Japan. Mr. Khan is also co-founder of Chowk, a niche portal focusing on South Asia. Mr. Khan started his career as part of the Itanium microprocessor group at Intel Corporation. Mr. Khan has over 20 industry patents applied for or pending in computer design and architecture, including four from his work at Intel and one from his graduate research at MIT. As a widely renowned leader in advanced Internet technology and a successful entrepreneur, he has lectured at the country's top business schools, including MIT and Harvard, and has been profiled in publications such as USA Today, New York Times, and The Entrepreneur. Mr. Khan received a BS in Mathematics (1992) and an MS in Computer Engineering (1995) from MIT, where, in 1991, he was elected Institutional Nominee by the Department of Mathematics, as one of six distinguished scholars in Mathematics.

Bilal Musharraf

Bio: Bilal Musharraf is Director of Operations at One Market Capital in San Francisco. Prior to joining One Market, Bilal was part of the founding team at Khan Academy managing internationalization. He began his career in the actuarial profession with Towers Watson and went on to work in investment management for the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority and for ePlanet Ventures. Bilal has an MBA and MA in Education from Stanford University and BS in Actuarial Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Irfan Muzaffar

Bio: Dr. Irfan Muzaffar is an Associate Fellow at the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives (IDEAS) in Lahore, Pakistan. Dr. Muzaffar has a PhD in Curriculum, Instruction, and Education Policy from Michigan State University and a Masters of Arts in Mathematics Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. He has been working as a teacher, teacher educator, and more recently as a researcher for the last twenty years. His current research interests center on teacher education, mathematics education in multilingual contexts, and politics of education reforms. He has published his work in Comparative International Review, Education Theory, Cultural Studies of Science Education, and Journal of Social and Policy Sciences. He also contributes a biweekly column on issues of education reform in The News on Sunday.

Amjad Noorani

Bio: Amjad Noorani is on the advisory board of The Citizens Foundation (TCF), USA, a non-profit organization working for education of underprivileged children in Pakistan.

Sanaa Riaz

Bio: Sanaa Riaz teaches Anthropology at the Metropolitan State University, Denver. She graduated from the University of Karachi, Pakistan, with Bachelor’s in History and a Master’s in Archeology and earned her doctorate in Anthropology from the University of Arkansas. Learning and teaching languages being her passion besides Anthropology, she then pursued a graduate degree in Applied Linguistics from the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Riaz has taught History and Humanities at the high school and college levels in Pakistan and Anthropology and ESL at a variety of institutions in the United States. She was an American Association for University Women 2008-9 International Fellow. She conducted her ethnographic fieldwork in Karachi, Pakistan and recently published a book titled “New Islamic schools: Tradition, modernity, and class in urban Pakistan” with Palgrave Macmillan.