Shamira Ahmed

Shamira is a social scientist with over a decade of combined practical and research experience as a policy entrepreneur, quantitative economist, management consultant, strategic advisor, and transdisciplinary policy specialist. She is a member of the Econometric Society, was a 2023 Internet Society Mid-Career Fellow, and a 2023-2024 European University Institute (EUI) Policy Leader Fellow.

As a transdiciplinary expert, her research interests include human rights centered sustainable digital transformation, responsible governance of emerging digital technologies (EDTs), ethical innovation & structural change ,and mitigating multidimensional inequities in the digital age.

Shamira is the executive director of the Data Economy Policy Hub (DepHUB), the first independent think tank founded by an Indigenous African woman in South Africa, Shamira is a pioneering figure in advancing transnational policy discourse on the global digital economy and society.
She is also a PhD Candidate at TU Delft, focusing on the Ethics of Quantum Technologies.

Shamira is the inaugural global chair of the European Union's Digital for Development (D4D) Hub Civil Society & Academia Advisory Group (CSAAG), she has led numerous multinational policy-oriented research projects and contributed significantly to publications such as the African Union Commission's "Data Policy Framework", Global Partnership on AI's Report "Towards Real Diversity and Gender Equality in Artificial Intelligence", and UNESCO's "Human Rights-Centered Global Governance of Quantum Technologies", to name a few.