Nirmal Riaz is a Senior Research Associate at the Karachi Urban Lab (KUL), a multi-disciplinary research institute based in Karachi, Pakistan.

She graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Social Sciences with a major in Sociology at SZABIST, Karachi. She received an M.A. in Social Anthropology from the University of Heidelberg, Germany. She has worked as a working student for the Max Planck Institute for International Peace and the Rule of Law, Heidelberg. Her research interests are in sociocultural anthropology with a special focus on environmental history, postcolonial encounters with infrastructure, gender relations and political ecology.