Dr Habib combines academic and professional capabilities with personal experience of growing up in an emerging country and now living in the west. She founded the Centre for Resilience and Sustainable Development (CRSD) at Cambridge where she leads a group of 20 academic, political and practitioners. She is also the founder of the Resilience and Sustainable Development Programme (RSDP) at the Department of Engineering.
She also holds several Advisory and Board level positions. She is currently on the Board Member of the University of Cambridge’s Board of Scrutiny, Special Advisor for the EAT Foundation, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA), Khalili Foundation and including European International Advisor to several developing countries' universities and foundations.. Previously she was a Fellow of the World Economic Forum (WEF), Advisor for Sanger Institute, and several UN Agencies global summits. In all of her role, Dr Habib aiming to be part of the global solution and apply systems thinking to help improve the systems arounds us.
From small states to large states, Dr Habib has addressed challenges in 75 countries linked with resilience and sustainable development. In 2023 Commonwealth Day she was recognised by the King of England for her research called 'Our Action, Their Future'. She developed a dozen innovative participatory methodologies which combine engineering research methods with political economics theories and behavioural insights, gathering tools to improve data collection and accelerate collective decision making.
Dr Habib is dedicated to improving the way evidence-based decisions are made, using a unique combination of modern virtual communication, mobile technologies and facilitated and deliberated inquiry in gathering primary data for research. Trained in Computer Science, Financial Accounting, Economics and Development Studies from US and UK, Dr Habib is championing transdisciplinary action-research scholarship at University of Cambridge and beyond. She combines engineering methods of problem solving with political economics theory and neuroscience insights to human decision making process to influence the way we make decisions.
Born and raised in Bangladesh, she is actively engaged through the Alumni network of her alma mater. Her way to give back to her alma mater is through mentorship as she does with students from Viqarunnisa Noon School and College, State University of New York, Oxford University, Columbia University, University of Cambridge and Harvard. Feel free to get in touch with her at nsh29@cam.ac.uk
