Dr. Rozina Karmaliani is a Professor and Interim Dean at the School of Nursing and Midwifery and joint faculty with the Department of Community Health Sciences at Aga Khan University (AKU), Pakistan. She became the first AKU alumna to have obtained a PhD in nursing in 2000, graduating from the University of Minnesota, USA. She has been associated with AKU for the last three decades, not only in Pakistan but also for the development and promotion of Higher Education in Nursing in East Africa, Afghanistan, Syria and Egypt. Dr. Karmaliani is a transformational leader with distinguished abilities to explore and implement new methods of managing and leading an academic organization, a strategic thinker, and a creative initiator.
She is also among the founding members of the PhD Nursing programme at AKU. Her research interests have included women, child and adolescent health, with a special focus on the prevention of gender-based violence, the promotion of adolescent mental health and the prevention of suicides from a health systems perspective.
Most recently, she has worked on “Hope for Life”, an adolescent suicide prevention program, and served as the principal investigator on a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded project for men’s engagement in women’s empowerment for improving maternal mental health. Dr Karmaliani’s recent research has focused on the role of play-based curriculum in schools to reduce depression and violence. The project has proven to be a flagship research endeavour, evidenced in its adaptation by WHO for its framework towards preventing gender-based violence. There has also been interest in scaling up the project from the United Nations and the World Bank. As a result of her work and with the collaboration of the provincial government, the play-based curriculum was recently launched in Pakistan for grades 1 through 8. Dr Karmaliani has served in a voluntary capacity as the Director for Aga Khan Health Services, Aga Khan Rural Support Program and concluded her tenure in July 2019 as founding National Chair, Aga Khan Health Board for Pakistan.