Dr. Maryam Mohiuddin Ahmed

Dr. Maryam Mohiuddin Ahmed is the Director of the Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation and Resilience (WISIR) and an Assistant Professor (Teaching Stream) of Business at the University of Waterloo. A social innovation scholar-practitioner, her work foregrounds decolonial and relational approaches to entrepreneurship, finance, systems change, and knowledge co-creation. Her research and pedagogy center “dialogues of wisdoms” and plural ways of knowing, doing, and being to reimagine social innovation as a path toward more equitable, regenerative futures.

Maryam is also a co‑steward of the Transition Bridges Project (TBP), a collaborative initiative pioneering systems mediation to address the polycrisis. TBP's practice involves acting as intermediaries across actors, scales, and systems to facilitate dialogue, mutual understanding, conflict transformation, and collective action toward resilient, regenerative communities.

Maryam completed her PhD in Sustainability Management at the University of Waterloo’s Faculty of Environment, where she was named Valedictorian. She also holds an LL.M. in International Law from the University of California, Berkeley, and B.A./LL.B. degrees from LUMS University. She is the co-founder of the Social Innovation Lab, an ecosystem builder for social innovation in South Asia, and Daftarkhwan, the largest co-working space network in Pakistan. Her current work bridges academic inquiry and lived practice through community-engaged learning, critical pedagogy, and systems-mediation experimentation.