The physicist who came back to build Pakistan's science

From Lahore to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship — with an engineering degree

The episode opens with Muzamil tracing Dr. Muhammad Sabieh Anwar’s early life: born in Lahore, schooled briefly in England while his father completed a PhD, then returned to Pakistan in 1985. The school that shaped him most was not the first one his parents chose. After a few months at Beaconhouse, his father moved him to Crescent Model School in Shadman — a large, open campus with grounds and experienced teachers who, as Dr. Anwar puts it, could create a taste for a subject rather than just deliver its content. “Aisay asatiza thay jo apnay poray apni shakhsiyat kay andar woh idhara thay aur bachon kay andar jo bhi mazmoon parhate uska zauq paida kar detay thay” — teachers who carried their discipline inside their whole personality and ignited a love for whatever they taught.

He completed his FSC at Government College Lahore in 1995 with strong marks, but his interest was always physics. In Pakistan at the time, high marks pointed toward medicine or engineering, not basic science. His family steered him toward electrical engineering at UET, where he graduated in 2000. The physics pull never left. He applied for a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford — straight out of his undergraduate degree — and got it, partly because a prominent Pakistani physicist on the panel, Shaukat Amir Khan, argued that the distance between engineering and physics was not as wide as the bureaucrats on the panel assumed.

At Oxford, Dr. Anwar worked on quantum computing. He explains the field in plain terms: at the scale of atoms and molecules, physics behaves differently from the everyday world. A quantum computer exploits those properties — specifically the spin of protons in liquid molecules — to process information in ways a conventional silicon computer cannot. The technique is related to MRI, which uses the same quantum phenomenon to image the water and tissue inside the human body. “Yeh bhi ek quantum phenomenon hota hai aaj ke hospitals mein jo aap jate hain.” The PhD took just over three years. Quantum computing in the early 2000s, he notes, was still at the stage where the chick had not yet hatched from the egg.

Post-doctoral work at Berkeley and the decision to come home

After Oxford, Dr. Anwar joined the lab of Alex Pines at UC Berkeley — one of the founders of NMR and MRI technique — for post-doctoral research on hyperpolarisation, a method of amplifying the MRI signal in the lungs, which are normally too diffuse to image. He spent two to three years there, continuing work on quantum computing in parallel.

The decision to return to Pakistan, he tells Muzamil, is not made at the end of a post-doc. It is made at the moment of departure. “Yeh faisla jate waqt hota hai keh jab aap mulk se bahar pehli dafa ja rahe hain, tab aapka zehan bilkul wazi hota hai.” If that clarity is absent at the start, the return rarely happens. For Dr. Anwar, the clarity was a conviction that basic sciences in Pakistan were absent and needed to be built. A team from LUMS — led by project director Dr. Khurram Afridi, now at Cornell — was travelling the United States surveying laboratories and designing what would become the Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering. They visited Berkeley. Dr. Anwar was interviewed during a holiday trip to Pakistan and received an offer before he flew back. He joined LUMS in 2007 as one of its first faculty members.

Building a school from nothing — fifteen years of it

Muzamil asks what the school looked like at the start and what it looks like now. Dr. Anwar’s answer is direct: there was no building. Faculty sat in small rooms. Today there are a hundred faculty members, thirteen to fourteen hundred students at any one time, twenty to twenty-five PhD graduates per year, and laboratories that exist nowhere else in Pakistan.

The thing he is most proud of is not the infrastructure. It is the freedom. “Sabse bari cheez azadi hai. Koi aur university ya science ka school hamare mulk mein aisa nahin hai jo yeh azadi de.” Faculty choose their own problems. No one wants to be head of department or dean for status — those are understood as responsibilities, not prizes. Students who want to study physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, or computer science now have a first-choice destination inside Pakistan.

When Muzamil presses him on whether he has any regret — whether the research he did at LUMS matched what he could have done had he stayed in the West — Dr. Anwar is candid. In pure research terms, no. The infrastructure is different. He used to work with liquid helium; that is not available here. But he reframes the question. “Achi taleem aapko reconfigurability sikhati hai.” Good education teaches you to adapt. CV Raman won a Nobel Prize doing spectroscopy with sunlight and a prism in Bangalore, with none of the facilities available in America. The impact Dr. Anwar chose to measure is different: the students whose lives changed, the colleagues whose work was enabled, the hundreds of thousands reached through the Khwarizmi Science Society.

What the school is actually working on — energy, water, cities, courts

Muzamil steers the conversation toward practical research. He notes that Pakistan’s vice-chancellor had mentioned work in agriculture, and raises the country’s looming food, water, and fertiliser crises. Dr. Anwar outlines seven research themes but focuses on the ones with direct national consequence.

On energy: Pakistan’s problem is not a shortage of generation sources but a failure to manage and connect them. The school, working with the LUMS Energy Institute, has mapped consumption patterns and calculated that the work has saved the country approximately one billion dollars per year in foreign exchange — a saving projected to continue for the next decade.

On transport and smog: electric vehicles, swappable battery stations, and policy frameworks for electric rickshaws, motorcycles, and buses have been developed in collaboration with external manufacturers. Pakistan’s first electric vehicle policy was formulated here.

On water: seventy percent of Pakistan’s diseases are linked to contaminated water. Faculty are working on separation and decontamination techniques, including alternatives to conventional desalination. The country’s position as one of the world’s great water corridors — from glaciers through rivers to the Arabian Sea — makes water management a complex, politically charged problem that technology can help resolve.

On cities: only ten percent of Lahore’s population lives within ten minutes’ walk of a public bus stop, yet public transport remains underused. The school is using geographic information systems, mobile sensors, and data-driven policy modelling to understand urban mobility and improve it.

On governance: Pakistan’s judicial system is, in Dr. Anwar’s words, “bilkul bikhra hua, tuta hua nizam.” The school has an e-judiciary initiative under a technology-for-people programme aimed at digitising and making court processes transparent.

He is also careful to defend work that has no immediate practical application — theoretical physics, mathematical proofs, quantum gravity. “Ek balance hona chahiye ek mulk kay andar, ek academia kay andar.” A country that closes its philosophy department, as he notes a former prime minister once suggested, loses something it cannot easily recover.

Why Pakistan’s engineers are not building Pakistan’s industry

Muzamil raises a question he has clearly been thinking about for some time: Pakistan is the fifth-largest country in the world, a fast-growing consumer market, and yet its cars are assembled from imported parts, its pharmaceuticals are packaged from imported active ingredients, and its consumer goods are branded versions of Chinese manufacturing. Where is the engineering?

Dr. Anwar agrees with the diagnosis and identifies two causes. The first is over-regulation. The Pakistan Engineering Council regulates curricula so tightly that students and faculty are not free to deviate, experiment, or pursue longitudinal projects. He describes what a four-year engineering programme could look like if a single team project — covering materials, aerodynamics, fluid mechanics, combustion, design, and simulation — ran the entire length of the degree. That kind of freedom does not currently exist.

The second cause is the absence of mission statements from political leadership. “Jab Amriki pehli dafa chand par gaye, toh Kennedy ki taraf se mission statements aate hain.” When a head of state says we will put a man on the moon, the entire system orients toward it. Pakistan has no equivalent declaration for building its own engine, its own vehicle, its own pharmaceutical ingredient.

But the deeper structural problem, he argues, is that there is almost no industry to liaise with. Physics has no industry. Biology has almost none. Pharmaceutical companies are packaging operations. “Industry university liaison ko chorkar ab hamara agla yeh goal hona chahiye keh hamari academics jo students nikle, they will create the industry.” Students have to build what does not yet exist. He points to examples already happening: a second-year NUST student building a computer-vision traffic analysis system, a LUMS graduate founding Move in Wheels — an AI-based driver monitoring company. The rate of this kind of activity has increased, he says, and COVID accelerated it further when students built ventilators from scratch.

The Khwarizmi Science Society and the Lahore Science Mela

Later in the discussion, Muzamil asks about the Khwarizmi Science Society, which Dr. Anwar co-founded in 1996 as a small club at UET. The original idea was simple: bring experts to give lectures and clear up the rote-learning culture around science. Over time the scope expanded from university to college to school to the general public.

The flagship initiative is the Lahore Science Mela. The logic behind it is cultural. A mela — a fair — is already part of how people in Punjab process the world. People go to melas when they are troubled, to forget their worries, to watch the wall of death, to eat street food, to dance. “Science ka mela keh yahan par log science ke kartab dekh sakein.” Science as spectacle, as wonder, as something that belongs to everyone.

Dr. Anwar describes the first step of learning as haerat — astonishment. A child who looks through a microscope at an onion cell, or through a telescope at sunspots, can have their life changed in a single moment. The society’s goal is to make that moment available to children who have never left their village, who have never been told that science is for them. He describes a child from inner Sindh who came to the Science Mela for the first time, having never left his province, and found himself standing between a stall from an Italian bio-robotics team and the society’s own museum.

“Woh un bachon ab ek din mein uski chehra ka surat badal rahe hain.” The face changes in a single day.

Language as a scientific problem, not a cultural preference

Muzamil raises the language barrier — the fact that science instruction in Pakistan happens in English, a language neither many teachers nor many students actually command. The result is a performance of English that communicates nothing, and children who conclude they hate science when what they actually experienced was a communication failure.

Dr. Anwar treats this as a structural problem with a structural solution. Basic science education — at the matric and FSC level — must happen in Urdu or in local languages. There should be no embarrassment in communicating science in Urdu. Digital media is already moving in this direction: Khan Academy has Urdu versions, there are bilingual initiatives, and the society’s own platform Maktab.pk was built on this principle.

But language is only the first layer. The ecosystem around it matters too. “Aap music ka sahara lein, mauseeqi, film ka sahara lein. Documentaries ka sahara lein. Aap movies ko dub karein. Movies apni banaein. Scientific documentary making honi, scientific comics honi chahiye, science fiction, science ki novels honi chahiye.” He asks how many television channels in Pakistan discuss anything other than politics. The answer is almost none. When he became dean, one of his first acts was to create a science communicator position at LUMS and require that twenty to thirty percent of the school’s stories be published in Urdu. He also created a science illustrator position. The Lahore Science Mela is conducted in Urdu precisely because the people it is trying to reach live in Urdu, in Punjabi, in Pashto, in Sindhi.

“Aapko logon ki zubaan tak, logon ko samjhana hai na, unke liye aam fahm banana usko zaroori hai.”

Pakistan in 2050 — large problems, not unsolvable ones

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks Dr. Anwar to look forward to 2050, when Pakistan’s population is projected to reach four hundred million. Is he a hopeless optimist or a cautious one?

Dr. Anwar looks at comparable trajectories. Bangladesh, Vietnam, Turkey — a country described a century ago as the sick man of Europe that reformed itself under a progressive government. Latin America. All of them passed through difficult periods and came out changed. Pakistan is on a lower rung of the same ladder.

On the floods of 2022, he is precise: climate change increased precipitation. The rest — the billions in losses, the thousands of deaths, the millions displaced — happened because people built in the path of floodwater. “Climate change ne toh sirf barish hi zyada barhai hai ya toh.” The problems are human-made and therefore human-solvable.

He ends with a couplet — “Alam-e-rozgar ko asan bana diya, jo gham mila use gham-e-jana bana diya” — and a clear-eyed summary: he is not a die-hard optimist who believes everything will be fine. He believes the people who will succeed in Pakistan are those who learn to endure difficulty rather than be broken by it. “Mushkilaat ko jhelna seekhega.” And 2050, on balance, will be fine — provided government stays out of the way.

Muzamil closes by noting it was one of the best conversations he had had in recent memory, and that listening to Dr. Anwar’s Urdu was itself a pleasure.