I am Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. I study pharmaceutical capitalism, intellectual property, and law. I am trained as an anthropologist and lawyer, and work at the intersection of medical anthropology and law. From 2024-26, I will be a Harvard Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies.

I obtained my PhD in Anthropology from UC Berkeley in May 2022. Before starting my doctoral program, I practiced law in the San Francisco Bay Area for five years, as an advocate for improved mental health access for children in foster care, and subsequently as an intellectual property litigator at Morrison & Foerster, an international law firm headquartered in San Francisco. I obtained my first law degree, the BA in Jurisprudence, from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, followed by an LL.M. from Yale Law School.

My work is ultimately driven by the ubiquity of preventable death and suffering in the Global South. These stakes inform the arc of my career both in academia and legal advocacy, which includes representation of asylum applicants, advocating for improved healthcare for children in foster care, and highlighting the persecution under blasphemy laws of religious minorities in Pakistan.

In addition to core introductory courses and courses on South Asia, I teach in the areas of medical anthropology and law. Two new courses I have designed and am currently teaching (in Winter 2023-24) are “The Capitalist Lives of Pharmaceuticals”, which examines how the calculi of Big Pharma condition pharmaceutical access; and “Medical Anthropology and Law”, which trains a feminist legal lens upon the fraught ethical terrains of abortion, genetics, clinical trials, and opioid addiction. My teaching foregrounds the deep yet under-explored relationships between medical anthropology and law. I teach across genre, including film, fiction, and legal decisions in my syllabi. I am invested in collaborations across law and anthropology, and am an inaugural member of the ‘Intellectual Property, Technology & Justice Research Group’ at UBC’s Allard Law School.

In addition to anything related to anthropology, I welcome queries from students considering law school or interdisciplinary careers.

I am currently working on my first book manuscript, Scandal in a Spectral Place: Pharmaceutical Capitalism in Pakistan. The book builds on my dissertation, which received the Pirzada Prize for best dissertation on Pakistan across North America and Europe. Despite some of the world’s lowest drug prices, and barely any patents filed by Western multinationals, Pakistan confronts one of the highest global burdens of treatable diseases, drug shortages, and a devastating epidemic of unpalliated cancer pain due to morphine scarcity. The book unravels these puzzles by rethinking the relationships between pharmaceutical access and price, property, and narcotics control. It foregrounds the geopolitical entanglements of pharmaceutical political economies, an under-explored intersection within the discipline. The book draws from two years of ethnographic fieldwork in the cities of Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad, Pakistan. This research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Social Sciences Research Council, American Association of University Women, and Berkeley Fellowship.

EXTERNAL FELLOWSHIPS AND AWARDS

2024-26 Postdoctoral Fellowship, Harvard Academy Scholars Program, Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies

2023 S.S. Pirzada Dissertation Prize in Pakistan Studies for best dissertation on Pakistan across North America and Europe

2021-22 American Association of University Women (AAUW) Dissertation Completion Fellowship

2017-18 Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant

2017-18 Social Sciences Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship (SSRC IDRF)

2015 American Institute of Pakistan Studies (AIPS) Summer Research Grant

2003 Rhodes Scholarship (one of two scholars-elect from Pakistan)

INTERNAL SCHOLARSHIPS AND AWARDS

2023 Public Humanities Seed Grant, Public Humanities Hub, University of British Columbia

2023 Arts Undergraduate Research Award (AURA), University of British Columbia

2013-17 Berkeley Fellowship (four-year competitive university graduate fellowship)

2008-10 Yale Law School Arthur Liman Public Interest Fellowship

2005 Lovells Prize (awarded by Lincoln College, University of Oxford, for ‘exceptional academic ability’)

2004 University of Oxford, Lincoln College Exhibition (scholarship ‘awarded to mark academic achievement and exceptional promise’)

2004 University of Oxford, Hanbury Scholarship (awarded based on academic performance)

1998-2002 Lahore University of Management Sciences Full Merit Scholarship (awarded to three highest ranked undergraduates)

PROFESSIONAL LEGAL EXPERIENCE

2011-13 Intellectual Property Litigation Associate, Morrison & Foerster LLP, Palo Alto, CA

Pro Bono Work:
Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project (In collaboration with Stanford Law School)
Fresh Lifelines for Youth (criminal record sealing)
Tuolumne River Trust
No-Fly List Litigation

2008-10 Attorney and Yale Liman Fellow, National Center for Youth Law (NCYL), Oakland, CA