Munawar Ahmed is a designer and educator, currently serving as global head of design for Oliver Wyman, an elite management consultancy known for its thought leadership and financial services expertise. Over the last two decades, she has provided forward-thinking, strategic guidance to some of the world’s largest and most prestigious organizations, from Fortune 100 companies to nonprofits to family foundations. She is an expert in strategic planning, organizational design, systems design, content management systems, search engine optimization, and social media strategy.
She currently serves on the board of directors for three nonprofit boards: Public Health Solutions, Vote Run Lead, and Wassaic Project. For the Rex Brasher Association, Munawar brings her clear-thinking, no-nonsense approach to getting things done and is currently designing and running strategic planning workshops for the board, advisors, and staff. She is an optimistic realist, able to process impossibly large volumes of information, turn chaos into order, and create notably elegant solutions — at scale.
On any given project, Munawar Ahmed is deeply involved from inception to release, and has been described as the unrelenting force that holds the entire project and its people together. Munawar lives in Wassaic, New York, with her husband, Matthew, and her two children, Owen (14) and Alastair (12). When she is not with them, she does humanitarian work at the border for men, women, and children escaping extreme violence. Munawar believes in giving back, every day.
Munawar Ahmed graduated from Stanford University with a B.A. in Cognitive Science and Human Behavior, from USC with an M.S.Ed in Curriculum and Instructional Design, and from Columbia University with professional certification in Systems Analysis and Software Engineering. She teaches design in the MFA program for Interaction Design at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York City and is a guest lecturer at the Stanford Design School (Stanford d.school) in Palo Alto, California.