Biography:

Dr. Aurangzeb Zulfiqar Khan is Principal Research Officer (previously Assistant Professor) in the Department of Management Sciences at the COMSATS Institute of Information Technology in Islamabad, Pakistan. He holds a PhD and a master degree in public administration from the German University of Administrative Sciences in Speyer, and a Diplom in business administration from the University of Trier, Germany. Dr. Khan started his professional career in 1992 as Executive Assistant in Hilal Consultants, a small Pakistani consulting firm specializing in infrastructure projects. He subsequently joined the Hanns-Seidel Foundation of Germany as Programme Coordinator at its Pakistan country office in Islamabad. There he worked closely with the Foundation’s partner organizations in government, academia and the non-governmental sector on various joint projects, primarily in institutional capacity building and event management. After leaving the Foundation he worked as a Research Fellow at the Institute of Strategic Studies, Islamabad, a think tank operating under Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. On the faculty of the young and rapidly expanding Pakistani public-sector university COMSATS since March 2005, Dr. Khan taught project management and other management subjects, mostly at graduate level. In September 2008 he launched Pakistan’s first professional master degree program in project management at his university which he headed for its first year of operation. Dr. Khan is winner of the Higher Education Commission of Pakistan’s national Best University Teacher Award for the year 2007. Selected by the United States Education Foundation in Pakistan as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar, Dr. Khan spent eleven months in 2010-11 undertaking research at the University of Maryland in College Park, USA. In the spring semester 2011 he taught his course on project stakeholder management at graduate level and a course on project communications at undergraduate level at UMD’s prestigious A. James Clark School of Engineering. He taught again at the University of Maryland in Spring Semester 2015 and is presently jointly undertaking an intensive research project on the theme project stakeholder management and engagement with his colleagues Miroslaw Skibniewski and John H. Cable at the University of Maryland’s Project Management Center for Excellence.