Ali M. Mir

Ali M. Mir is an associate in the Population Council’s Pakistan office. He serves as director of programs and works to expand access to family planning services through research, training, and advocacy.

From 2011–2012, Mir directed the Council’s large-scale USAID funded FALAH project, a multifaceted intervention that increased family planning use by 9 percentage points in focus districts by emphasizing the benefits of birth spacing to women’s and children’s health. In the area of capacity-building, as part of a Packard Foundation–funded activity, Mir developed several training programs for mid-career professionals in conducting social science research.

When he joined the Population Council in 1998, Mir led a training program aimed at introducing a reproductive health–focused framework to government health and population managers. Currently he is providing oversight to a National Advocacy and Media Campaign on Population Related Issues and Need for Birth Spacing Services supported by UNFPA, aimed at changing the current complacency around population issues.

Mir is vice president of the Population Association of Pakistan and a member of the American Public Health Association, the Royal Society for Health, the Pakistan Medical Association, the Mother and Children Welfare Association of Pakistan, the International Union for Scientific Study of Population, the Human Resource Development Network, the International AIDS Society, and the Society of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Pakistan. He seeks out opportunities to share research findings with policymakers, program managers, and other researchers, and has authored two books, published numerous research publications, and presented at many scientific conferences and meetings.

Mir is a medical doctor and holds an MPH from the University of Leeds, where he was supported by a Chevening scholarship awarded by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office to outstanding scholars with leadership potential. He has also completed several postgraduate training courses, including the International Family Planning Leadership Program at the Public Health Institute in Santa Cruz, CA (supported by a Packard-Gates fellowship), the Strategic Leadership in Reproductive Health program at Johns Hopkins University (supported by a Gates fellowship), and a Harvard University executive training program in Health Management. Mir is an adjunct faculty member of the Health Services Academy, Government of Pakistan and committee member of Courses for Sociology at Allama Iqbal Open University Islamabad. He is also an external reviewer for STI guidelines development by the World Health Organization. He has authored two books for medical students on basic epidemiology and medical demography and has several national and international research publications to his credit.