Sarfraz Ahmad

Local Scientific Coordinator of IMM Pakistan Program at CUI Lahore Campus

After your PhD in Pakistan, you first have attended your Post Doctorate outside Pakistan, visiting Germany, Italy, Spain, France and other countries in Europe and beyond. How much did your personal experience play a role in your commitment to the IMM Pakistan program?

I have visited 28 countries, for study experiences, conferences or mathematical events, and I can feel that there’s a difference in the level of education in Pakistan compared to other countries: level of the students, level of the teaching… creating an international mathematics master could play a role in removing these differences.

Moreover, in Pakistan we have many computational mathematicians, but very few people are working in pure mathematics, and when we created this program in 2019, one of the aims was to have mathematicians with an interest in pure mathematics.

As an organizer of the program together with Stefano Luzzatto, you saw the IMM program from its start. What did you like about the original idea?

The journey started in 2018: at that time, the aim was to organize just a few courses; a couple of professors came just with the invitation to teach Master-level students. Then, when they had those courses, they figured out that there was a possibility to start a more focused Master program. So we started to imagine a complete master program; in 2019 professor Stefano Luzzato and a couple more professors came here and in five months we planned a complete program with the idea to attract very good students. We decided to give the lectures at Lahore Campus, and in September 2019 in Trieste we signed a collaboration agreement between the International Center of Theoretical Physics (ICTP) and COMSATS University Islamabad (CUI)within the framework of the ICTP Affiliated Centre program. That’s how IMM Pakistan started.

How has it gone so far?

So far the response is good, we have many success stories of IMM students flying outside Pakistan to continue their academic careers. From our first Batch almost all the students got a scholarship in universities and academic centers outside Pakistan: it is a remarkable result.

Yes, it is! Is the actual IMM Pakistan program what you expected?

The initial purpose was very clear: to give Pakistani students and students from developing countries a high quality education, in order to let them take Masters or PhD outside Asia, and in this sense I think we are succeeding.

You are not just a coordinator of the program, but also a teacher. What do you teach?

I teach and research in the field of Commutative Algebra, and in IMM program I teach the basics of Abstract Algebra together with my collaborator, professor Volkmar Welker, from Philipps-Universität Marburg in Germany.

How is teaching IMM students? Is it different from your previous teaching experiences?

This batch of IMM gathers excellent students, and teaching them is more challenging than usual. For example, they already know most of the basics of Algebra, and this gives us the opportunity to go more in depth with the topics we intend to tackle.

Thank you, professor.