Afzal Ahmad, M.D.

Co-Founder, President & Chief Executive

Afzal Ahmad, recently retired from his highly successful Ophthalmology practice based in Chicago. He is known for his numerous local and international philanthropic endeavors and his extensive collection of South Asian art. Together with his wife, he established the South Asia Institute to cultivate the arts and culture of South Asia and also endowed a professorship at the University of Michigan in order to promote education and research in South Asian arts. 

Shireen Ahmad, M.D.

Co-Founder, Secretary & Chief Artistic Director

Shireen Ahmad is a retired academic anesthesiologist. Along with her husband she has assembled is one of the major South Asian visual art collections (Hundal Collection) in the US. They are also the only South Asian Americans to have endowed a professorship in South Asian arts at a US university. Her strong desire to share the artistic heritage and build bridges between communities through the arts is manifested in the exhibitions, programs and events at the South Asia Institute.

Omer Ahmed

Chief Strategy and Development Director

Omer Ahmed is the President and the Chief Investment Officer of Abaris Capital Advisors, a Chicago based boutique investment advisory firm specializing in niche alternative investment strategies. Previously Omer has been associated in a senior role with numerous well known investment houses all over the world. He and  his family have supported several local charitable organizations including St Jude’s Children Hospital and HOBY ( a Youth Leadership Charity). Internationally their charitable affiliations span various areas of Middle East and South Asia in the field of Education, Healthcare and Finance.

Azra Raza, M.D.

Azra Raza is the Chan Soon-Shiong Professor of Medicine and Clinical Director of The Evans Foundation MDS Center at Columbia University. A practicing oncologist seeing 30-40 cancer patients weekly, she also directs a basic cancer research lab with hundreds of original publications in high profile journals. She worked with President Clinton designing Breakthrough Developments in Science and Technology and with VP Joe Biden for the Cancer Moonshot initiative.

Her latest book, THE FIRST CELL: And the human costs of pursuing cancer to the last was published in October 2019. Her life is devoted to early detection and prevention of cancer.

Deepanjana D. Klein, Ph.D.

Deepanjana Klein is the International Head of Department for Contemporary Indian & Southeast Asian Art at Christie’s, New York City. Prior to that she has been an independent curator in New York City and has numerous exhibitions of contemporary Indian art to her credit.

Deepanjana played a central role in acquiring the business of the estate of Francis Newton Souza, one of the most important historical sales in the category. Deepanjana has a Ph.D. in Indian Art History from De Montfort University in England and has taught art history, theory, and aesthetics at the Leicester School of Architecture in England and at the Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture and Environmental Studies in Mumbai.

Her publications include contributions to the Encyclopedia of Sculpture (Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2004) and she regularly writes for various journals on the topic of contemporary Indian art. She is the recipient of several awards, including a grant from the Mellon Foundation (ArtStor) for her photographic documentation of the Ellora cave temples.

Sairah Alvi, PH.D.

Sairah Alvi has a Masters in Global Management from the London School of Economics and a Ph.D. in Molecular Oncology from Rush University, Chicago. She is the Founder & CEO Precision Diagnostic Laboratory, that provides genomic and molecular diagnostic bioinformatics and education in personalized medicine.

She has been surrounded by the literary great minds since early childhood and as a book ambassador she has regularly hosted writers, poets and musicians. Over the years she has supported several local arts organizations in Chicago.