Professor Zia Ul-Qayyum, PhD FBCS, FPAS
Executive Director, Digital & AI
Professor Qayyum is a distinguished academic strategist and digital transformation leader with over 30 years of experience leading education, research, and operations at institutional, system, and industrial levels. As the Executive Director of Digital & AI at Manchester Global Foundation (MGF), he provides strategic leadership on the integration of Data and AI to modernise health systems within low- and middle-income countries. His work at MGF focuses on high-level governance and the creation of sustainable, technology-driven frameworks to strengthen data-enabled decision support and locally usable analytics for health institutions.
A PhD graduate of the University of Leeds (UK), Professor Qayyum’s career is defined by the strategic intersection of Artificial Intelligence research and the macro-level governance of complex ecosystems. He previously served as the Executive Director of the Higher Education Commission (HEC) Pakistan, where he spearheaded the strategic oversight of a PKR 400 billion national development portfolio and launched comprehensive digital governance frameworks for, higher education sector. He is a Fellow of the British Computer Society (FBCS), a Fellow of the Pakistan Academy of Sciences (FPAS), and the inaugural President of the COMSTECH Inter-Islamic Network on Virtual Universities.
Beyond his executive leadership, Professor Qayyum has made significant research contributions in the domains of Intelligent Systems, Semantic Resilience, and Self-Adaptive Digital Twins. His broader research interests bridge spatio-temporal reasoning with the security of autonomous agentic systems. As CTO and Head of Digital Twin Innovation at StartupDen (UK), he directs the architecture of Digital Twin-as-a-Service (DTaaS) platforms, translating advanced AI research into commercial-ready industrial solutions. He has led high-impact international investigations, consistently bridging the gap between theoretical AI and real-world societal impact.