Dr Muhammad Sabieh Anwar, Fellow of the Pakistan Academy of Sciences, is Professor of Physics, and former Dean at the LUMS Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, which has about 1500 students, 500 staff members and a hundred PhD holders as Faculty and is the country’s leading science and engineering academy. He helped establish the School of Science and Engineering and initiate physics at LUMS and was among the principal founders of the School’s experimental facilities and curriculum. Ideas from his physics instructional laboratories, called PhysLab, have been replicated in ten Pakistani universities. He has played an important role in introducing innovative learning tools, mostly revolving around insightful homegrown physics experiments, in Pakistan’s universities. His lectures are interspersed with in-class live demonstrations and are widely viewed over the internet. He is co-founder of Qosain Scientific that has invented the PhysLogger and other scientific instruments. His latest initiative is the launch of an astronomy laboratory for the developing world, called Astrolab.
Sabieh’s research interests encompass spintronics, magnetism and optics. Sabieh has published around a hundred research articles in international journals including Science, the Physical Review series, Optics Express, Journal of the American Chemical Society and Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. His book on tabletop quantum mechanics experiments with single photons (second edition) was published by the Institute of Physics, UK. He is currently Director of the LUMS for Laboratory Quantum Processors which is part of Pakistan’s National Centre for Quantum Computing and was founding Director of the National Centre for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, a role from which he stepped down in 2022.
Sabieh is the General Secretary of the Khwarizmi Science Society which is focused on the popularization of science at the grassroots levels. The iconic Lahore Science Mela curated by Sabieh has attracted more than a hundred thousand visitors in 2023 alone. Prior to joining LUMS SSE in 2007, Sabieh was a post-doc in chemistry and materials science at University of California, Berkeley and a PhD student, as Rhodes Scholar, at the Oxford University. He is the recipient of the TWAS medal in physics for Pakistan in 2008 and the National Innovation Prize in 2015. He also serves as Advisory Board Member of several Pakistani Universities. Sabieh was awarded the civil award Tamgha-e-Imtiaz by the Government of Pakistan in 2025.
Currently, Sabieh is Deputy Head of the Science and Environment Sector at ICESCO, stationed in Rabat, Morocco.
