Sania Nishtar is the founder and president of the NGO think tank, Heartfile, which today is the most powerful health policy voice in Pakistan and is recognized as a model for replication in other developing countries. Her areas of interests are health systems, global health, broader issues of governance and public-private relationships.

In Pakistan her pioneering work in the health sectorhas inspired new initiatives and has shaped policies on health reform and non-communicable diseases. She is also the founder of Pakistan’s Health Policy Forum and provides support to many agencies in an advisory role. She additionally sits on many governing boards and is a visiting faculty to many educational institutions. Within Pakistan, she is also a voice to catalyze change at the broader governance level as an op-ed columnist in Pakistan’s largest English newspaper.

Internationally, Sania Nishtar’s scope of work has several dimensions. She is a member of many Expert Working Groups and Task Forces of the World Health Organization and is currently a member of the board of the International Union for Health Promotion and the Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research. She is also a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council, the Clinton Global Initiative, the Ministerial Leadership Initiative for Global Health and many other international initiatives. She has formerly been on several international Boards, and has chaired several global campaigns and programs. She has also been an advisor to WHO on numerous occasions, has published over 100 journal articles and is the author of 6 books. View Publications by category.

She speaks to audiences around the world and has been extensively published in and quoted in the media. Sania Nishtar is the recipient of Pakistan’s Sitara-e-Imtiaz, the European Societies Population Science Award, 16 gold medals and many accolades of the International Biographical Centre, Cambridge and the American Biographical Center. Sania Nishtar holds a Fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians of London and a Ph.D.