ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi on Monday appointed Dr Tariq Banuri as new chairman of the Higher Education Commission (HEC). The prime minister picked Dr Banuri out of four names forwarded to him by a six-member search committee for final selection. The post had fallen vacant on April 14 this year when the four-year term of Dr Mukhtar Ahmed lapsed. A six-member committee comprising former health minister Dr Sania Nishtar, former lawmaker Shahnaz Wazir Ali, educationists Faisal Bari, Mirza Qamar Baig and Syed Babar Ali and federal secretary education was tasked to search for an appropriate person for the slot. The newly appointed chairman of the HEC tops the list of four names forwarded by the committee to the prime minister. Other names on the list were of former vice chancellor of Islamia University Bahawalpur Dr Muhammad Mukhtar, Iqbal Chaudhry and Anwarul Hasan Gilani. Working as professor at the University of Utah, Dr Tariq Banuri holds a PhD degree in economics from the Harvard University and MA in development economics from the Williams College. He started his career in the civil service of Pakistan and then joined the United Nations as research fellow at the World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER), a model that he adopted in setting up and serving as the founding executive director of the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) in Islamabad. Dr Banuri has also served as member of the board of governors of Pakistan’s central bank, member of Pakistan Environmental Protection Council, and member/secretary of the Presidential Steering Committee on Higher Education, as well as coordinating lead author of the Nobel Prize winning Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He has recently served as director at the Division for Sustainable Development at the United Nations. He is also author of 20 books, in addition to more than 30 research papers. Published in Daily Times, May 29th 2018.