Ali Cheema

Dr. Ali Cheema currently serves as the Vice Chancellor of LUMS. He has a BA in Mathematics and Statistics from Government College Lahore and a BA Honours in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from University of Oxford. A Rhodes Scholar, he also holds an MPhil in Economics and Politics and a PhD in Economics from the University of Cambridge.

He is a co-founder of the Center for Economic Research in Pakistan (CERP), a Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of Development and Economic Alternatives (IDEAS) and a co-lead academic of the IGC’s Pakistan programme. He has also been a member of the Board of Trustees of the Institute of Development Studies, Sussex and was the Chair of the Economics Department at LUMS from 2004-2010. He was also a founding member of the Stockholm Challenge Award winning portal, Relief Information System for Earthquakes, Pakistan (RISEPAK).

Dr. Cheema’s areas of research are political economy, public choice, development economics, economic history, governance and decentralization and his work has a strong policy focus. His work uses a combination of methodologies that include social network analysis, ethnographies, archival work, and GIS mapping along with rigorous econometric analysis.