Professor Nazia M Habib, FRSA, is the Founder and Research Centre Director for the Centre for Resilience and Sustainable Development (CRSD). She holds a Professor equivalent post with appointments at the Department of Engineering and the Department of Land Economy at the University of Cambridge. She developed the Cambridge Cocreation Laboratory methods, a set of frontier action-research methods. She is combining social psychology with political economics and systems approach thinking to improve collective decision-making on complex challenges that are contested and constrained by time and resources. 

Trained in Computer Science, Accounting, Business Finance, Political Economy, and Sustainability Science at the State University of New York, the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, and Harvard University, Professor Habib’s interdisciplinary formation underpins her distinctive approach to complex global challenges. She contends that persistent inequality, institutional fragility, and systemic inefficiency stem not only from policy failure, but from limitations in how evidence is produced and translated into action.

Her research currently focuses on integrating systems thinking for applied resilience and sustainable development in the context of good governance, responsible innovation and sustainable investment. Leaders of more than 57 countries have benefited from her research methods and have seen improvements in their abilities to manage uncertainty.

Dr Habib has also advised over 20 governments on sustainable development and climate change-related policy issues. She was recognised on the Commonwealth Day 2023 by the King of England at Buckingham Palace for her research on the Commonwealth Small States. She also received the Cambridge University's prestigious Impact Award as an established academic.  

Before founding CRSD, Dr Habib was a founding University Lecturer for the MPhil in the Public Policy degree programme at Cambridge. She has been awarded Newton Fellowships, Commonwealth Scholarships and numerous research grants. She has been a Sustainability Science fellow at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At Cambridge, Dr Habib received the Claydon Prize for her outstanding PhD thesis in Economics, and her book ’Biofuels, Food Security, and Developing economies’ (2016) was ranked among the top three highly influential books of 2016 by Food Tank. Dr Habib is a 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), among others. Previously was a Fellow with the World Economic Forum (WEF), Non-Executive Board member for TISATech to help improve thinking around resilience and technology. Dr Habib is active within several Cambridge University-based research centres: Sanger Institute, Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, Cambridge Centre for Science and Policy (CSAP), Cambridge Global Food Security (CGFS), Cambridge Zero and Cambridge Forum for Sustainability and the Environment (CFSE) to name a few. She has been interviewed by Forbes, Vogue, The Gurdian to name a few global news media on her research and impacts she makes.