Rameen Iftihar is an education and gender specialist. She has led research and implementation efforts for gender justice, foundational literacy and numeracy, and critical AI use through outreach and pedagogy in the Global South. She has pioneered a multimodal approach to gender diversity, violence, and governance in South Asia as the lead investigator of an AHRC-funded grant. She co-founded Aghaaz, a community-based organisation for at-risk youth in Pakistan, where she designed and implemented programs for vulnerable K-12 students. She has worked with UNESCO and The Asia Foundation on global governance, system-level reform, and policy analysis. She has served as a doctoral facilitator for the Vice Chancellor’s Colloquium on AI at Oxford, taught English as a second language for over six years to adult learners, and consistently leverages film and emerging technologies to produce research-driven outputs to engage the public and policymakers alike.
She completed her MSEd at the University of Pennsylvania as a Fulbright scholar. Currently, as a Clarendon scholar at the University of Oxford, her doctoral research explores how young girls can translate the knowledge and resources that they gain from education into capabilities and alternative empowered life paths, and how communities can be leveraged for sustainable pathways for social change.
Recipient of Wallace Watson Career Scholarship 2026 at St Catherine’s College and CIES 2026 South Asia SIG Best Field Initiative Award.