Sania Nishtar graduated from medical school in 1986 as the best graduate with 16 gold medals, a college record, which remains unbroken to date. In 1999 she left a lucrative career as Pakistan’s first woman cardiologist to establish the NGO think-‐tank, Heartfile which today is the most powerful health policy voice and catalyst for health reform in Pakistan and is recognized as a model for replication in other developing countries. She also founded Pakistan’s Health Policy Forum and Heartfile Financing, a program to protect people against health impoverishment.
Sania Nishtar’s has in-‐country and international experience. Internationally, she is a member of many Expert Working Groups and Task Forces of the World Health Organisation, a member of the board of the International Union for Health Promotion, the Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research, the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council, the Ministerial Leadership Initiative for Global Health, the Clinton Global Initiative and is Chair of GAVI’s Evaluation Advisory Committee. She has previously led many global initiatives and is a regular plenary speaker, chair or moderator at global health meetings and a part of organizing committees.
Sania Nishtar is a key health policy voice in Pakistan, the author of Pakistan’s first health reform plan, Pakistan’s first compendium of health statistics, and the country’s first national public health plan for NCDs. She has the unique honour of signing three MoUs with Pakistan’s Ministry of Health committing her time pro bono to write these documents. One of her books, an analysis of Pakistan’s health systems became the blue print for the country’s health policy. She is a member of many boards, advisory groups and task forces and a voice to catalyze change at the broader governance level in Pakistan.
Sania Nishtar is the author of 6 books, more than 100 peer review articles and around the same number of op-‐eds. Her latest, Choked Pipes, was published by Oxford University Press in 2010. She is the recipient of Pakistan’s Sitara e-‐Imtiaz, a presidential award, the European Societies Population Science Award, the Global Innovation award, and many accolades of the International Biographical Centre, Cambridge and the American Biographical Center. Sania Nishtar holds a Fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians and a Ph.D from Kings College, London.
