A dental educationist from Jamshoro has won one of British medical education’s most competitive career honours. Dr Rabia Anis, Assistant Professor in the Department of Medical Education at Liaquat University of Medical and Health Sciences (LUMHS), Jamshoro, has been named the 2026 winner of the ASME International Award for health professions education, formally the Health Professions Education Career Development Award (HPECDA) of the UK-based Association for the Study of Medical Education (ASME). The award brings funding of up to £20,000 to develop her research and her career.
What the ASME International Award Will Fund
The Health Professions Education Career Development Award is a competitive international funding initiative, open to individual ASME members at any career stage, and every application is scored through independent double marking, so winners are chosen blind on the strength of the proposal alone. The funding, up to £20,000, is deliberately flexible: ASME says it can support the groundwork for a PhD application, a fellowship proposal, a research grant, a pilot project or new collaboration. For an educator based at a public university in Sindh, it is the kind of backing that usually flows to applicants at long-established British institutions, which is part of what makes a win from Jamshoro stand out.
From a Karachi Dental College to Jamshoro
Dr Anis’s route to the award runs through classrooms on both sides of the profession. She qualified as a dentist with a BDS from Liaquat College of Medicine and Dentistry (LCMD) in Karachi in 2011, then moved into teaching and academic leadership at Isra Dental College in Hyderabad, where she served as a Senior Lecturer and as in-charge of its Department of Health Professions Education. She completed a Master of Health Professions Education (MHPE) at Aga Khan University, Karachi, in 2024. At LUMHS she now contributes to postgraduate health professions education, faculty development, educational assessment, curriculum development and research, the unglamorous machinery that decides how well Pakistan’s future doctors and dentists are actually taught.
Photo: Kskhh, via Wikimedia Commons
An Empathy Project With a Global Conversation
The work the award will support asks a human question with practical consequences: how is empathy understood and expressed across different healthcare contexts in Pakistan, and how should that shape the way clinicians are trained? Her research interests sit where that question leads: simulation-based education, technology-enhanced learning, and educational practice in resource-constrained settings, where good teaching has to be designed for the wards and budgets that actually exist. Supported by the ASME International Award, the project is intended to bring a perspective from a low and middle income country into an international conversation that is usually dominated by wealthy health systems, and to strengthen her own doctoral trajectory. It is also a reminder of the depth building up in Pakistani academia, in the same season as the Rhodes Scholarships for Pakistan, record graduations such as the UMT 29th convocation, and free Google Career Certificates for minority students in Punjab. Winning an ASME International Award from Jamshoro tells younger educators across Sindh that the door is open to them too.
Why It Matters Beyond One Career
For LUMHS, the win is institutional as well as personal. A public sector university in Jamshoro now counts an ASME career development winner on its faculty, in the one field, health professions education, that shapes how every other subject in medicine and dentistry is taught. Honours like this also travel: they tell accreditation visitors, research collaborators and prospective students that serious educational scholarship is being done in Sindh, and they give younger lecturers a worked example of how an application built from local teaching problems can win international competition.
Sources
- Dental News Pakistan: Pakistani Dental Educationist Rabia Anis Wins ASME Award 2026, 3 November 2026
- ASME: Dr Rabia Anis Announced as the 2026 HPECDA Winner
- ASME: Health Professions Education Career Development Award, Award Page
- Featured image: Dr Rabia Anis in the ASME award announcement graphic. Graphic: ASME, via Dental News Pakistan
- In-body image: The Aga Khan University Hospital private wing, Karachi. Photo: Kskhh, via Wikimedia Commons
Umar Farooq is the founder and editor of Good News Pakistan. An engineer by profession and a writer by passion, he started the site in December 2022 to share good news from Pakistan, and has since written and edited more than 200 articles about its people, sports, science, business and world records. He believes the story of Pakistan is bigger than its headlines, and that good news, told honestly, is worth telling every day.