Mehrab Ali

Founder & Executive Director

Mehrab Ali has a multidisciplinary background in economics, management, and data analysis for over 12 years. He has a strong record of accomplishment of more than 50 research projects which include large-scale development research projects, Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) experimental research, other impact evaluation, and exploratory research projects across different public, private and international agencies, including the World Bank, UNDP, GoB, ILO, UNICEF, BRAC, ODI and many more.

He has in-depth knowledge and expertise in research design, questionnaire design, training field staff, quality control, data cleaning, and statistical analysis. He has experience managing over ten large-scale research projects, both in sample size and timeframe. He also has extensive experience of working with large datasets. He also has numbers of publications in reputed journals and conference proceedings, aside from numbers of monograph, working papers, and reports. He was also selected as one of the top one thousand SDG talents worldwide and participated in the UNLEASH Innovation Lab 2017 initiated by the UN. He is also selected as one of the top 20 NCD talents to participate in the Youth Innovation Lab 2018, aligned with the WHO Global Dialogue program and organized by the World Diabetes Foundation, NCD Child, NCD Free, IFMSA, and Young Professionals Chronic Disease Network.

His technical skills/competencies also entail different software such as Statistical Software (SPSS, Stata, E-Views, R, SAS), Database software (CSPro, Microsoft Access, Electronic Data Collection (Open Data Kit – ODK, SurveyCTO, Formhub), Online data collection (MySQL and PHP), GIS software (ArcView, QGIS), Programming Language (Visual Basic for Applications, Python), Designing and presentation (LaTex, Macromedia Flash). Mr. Ali guides the field team regarding the design of the questionnaire in ODK and SurveyCTO, quality control, data analysis, and any critical problems arising in the field. He also has extensive experience in implementing CAPI and CATI surveys as well as developing innovative tools to facilitate remote training and CATI during the pandemic situation. He has added important features in the SurveyCTO CATI toolkit such as attempt recording, attempting multiple phone numbers and dynamically adding new phone numbers to the CATI workflow, feature to allow submitting ‘half-done survey in case the enumerator lose the respondent or the respondent refuses to continue at any point, etc. He has also developed a SurveyCTO field plug-in to incorporate YouTube videos in SurveyCTO form to enable video content-based remote training for the enumerators.