Marie Lall
Professor Marie Lall is Chair of Education and South Asian Studies at the UCL Institute of Education and a South Asia Specialist working on India, Pakistan, and Myanmar. She is the former Pro-Vice-Provost for South Asia at UCL, where she was instrumental in developing four UCL university partnerships with India‘s top-ranking universities in engineering, medicine, aerospace, and science.
She has provided thought leadership to development agencies, policymakers, and governments in the region and internationally. She has been a senior consultant to the World Bank, UNICEF, the British Council, AUSAID, and South Asian philanthropic bodies. In 2022 she was an assessor for the Israeli government to help review the Social Science Faculty at Bar Ilan University. She is the lead expert on the EU Mobility Programme for Myanmar, an EU-funded Higher Education programme linked to ASEAN SHARE.
Her education research encompasses Education Policy, Higher Education as well as Teacher Training and Language of Instruction. In Myanmar, she advised the Ministry of Education on education reforms, particularly Higher Education, working with 11 Universities around the country. Her current work on Higher Education includes a project on international university rankings in East Asia, research on the role of universities as safe spaces for refugees and the decolonisation of Higher Education, looking at the UK, Japan, Russia, and India.
She is the author/editor of 12 widely cited books. Her most recent books include Youth and the National Narrative Education, Terrorism and the Security State in Pakistan (with Tania Saeed, Bloomsbury 2020), Myanmar's Education Reforms- A Pathway to Social Justice? (UCL Press, 2021) and Bridging Neoliberalism and Hindu Nationalism (with Kusha Anand, Bristol University Press 2022).
She appears regularly on BBC News 24/ BBC World, Sky TV, Aljazeera TV and BBC Radio (World Service) to give interviews on politics and international relations in South Asia. In 2019 her work was honoured at the House of Commons, and she was named one of the 100 most influential people in UK-India relations.
She completed her B.Sc. Economics and PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Sciences (LSE) and her MPhil from Cambridge University.