Fouzia Saeed - Personal Profile

Personal Profile

Saeed was born on 3 June 1959, in Lahore, Pakistan. She received most of her schooling and early college education in Peshawar, Pakistan where she graduated from the University of Peshawar with a BS in Home Economics as the University Gold Medalist for Academic Excellence in 1979. As a result of her academic achievements, she received a Quaid-e-Azam Overseas Educational Award and spent 8 years at the University of Minnesota, where she earned an MS in Design and a Doctorate in Education. She received additional funding from the Ethel L. Parker International Fellowship Award of the American Home Economics Association for her doctoral research. Saeed returned to her native land immediately after completing her degrees, but has returned to Minneapolis on several occasions as a visiting lecturer and to receive a Distinguished International Alumni Award in 1998 and the International Leadership Award in 2008, both presented by the University of Minnesota in recognition of her contributions to the field of education and the women’s movement in Pakistan.

She presently serves as the Director of Mehergarh: A Center for Learning where she heads its programs on youth, gender and human rights.

She lives in Islamabad with her husband, Paul Lundberg, whom she met in 1995 when they were both working in the United Nations in Pakistan. They have also lived together in Manila and Cairo. She is one of the very few Pakistani women of her generation who has learned how to SCUBA dive and has dived in the Bahamas, the Mergui Archipelago of Burma, Fiji, and various islands of the Philippines.