Maha specialises in designing and evaluating programs, products and policies to improve resource allocation, service delivery, welfare and impact. Her research is at the intersection of development in particular health and climate change and behavioral economics. She undertakes field experiments in partnership with governments and non-governmental organizations in South Asia to understand the constraints and design solutions considering the binding constraints. She works closely with local research firms and universities. She enjoys carefully collating unique and large datasets that are necessary to answer the questions at hand.
She is currently enrolled as a PhD Student at Cornell University. Previously, she has taught at LUMS, Economics Department and was formerly Director Policy, Mahbub-ul-Haq Research Centre at LUMS.
From 2020-2022, she actively engaged in multi-pronged analytical response to COVID in Pakistan tracking the disease incidence and economic indicators, predicting disease outbreak, assessing impact on income, unemployment and remittances and evaluating the efficacy of policies using various methods.
Prior to that she setup an Evaluations Wing that was also focused on embedding data in the decisions and operations of private and public sector companies to increase efficiency, impact and profit. She has also led research experiments in the fields of education, public finance and governance. She combines her coursework in economics with her interest in entrepreneurship and is also a Pakistan Acumen Fellow, 2016. She has completed her masters level graduate studies in Economics from Duke University, USA and has an undergraduate degree in Economics and Mathematics from LUMS.
She frequently writes for DAWN and other daily publications and blogs.