Doctoral Student Ijaz Ahmad is a doctoral candidate at the McBee Institute of Higher Education at the University of Georgia. He works as a graduate research assistant with Professor Krystal L. Williams on her NSF Career grant project, exploring persistence and strain among Black women pursuing computing sciences degrees. He holds a BS in Electrical Engineering (Pakistan), M.Phil in Public Policy (Pakistan), and an MA in Higher Education (Austria, Finland, and China), which the European Erasmus Mundus Scholarship Program sponsored. As part of his master's program, he worked as an intern in European University Association (EUA) in Brussels, Belgium. In 2019, Ijaz received a nine-month fellowship from Finnish National Agency for Education (EDUFI) to conduct his research at Tampere University, Finland, with Dr.Yuzhuo Cai. During his fellowship, Ijaz worked on a European Commission-funded project, HELIX4EU, centered on understanding European higher education reforms. The findings of this project have culminated into a publication, "From an Entrepreneurial University to a Sustainable Entrepreneurial University: Conceptualization and Evidence in the Contexts of European University Reforms (2021)," published in the Journal Higher Education Policy. Previously Ijaz served at various administrative positions in the higher education sector in Pakistan. His research interests center on universities' social and economic engagement for societal development, comparative higher education, the role of international organizations in higher education, and change in higher education. Ijaz has co-authored with Dr. Hearn book chapter that investigates the convergences and divergences of higher education reforms in North America and Western Europe. They also have presented their work centered on "the adoption and diffusion of performance-based funding model in European higher education" at the European EGOS Conference, Germany.
