On 16 October 2025, Nature and The Estée Lauder Companies announced the winners of their annual Inspiring Women in Science awards. The Science Outreach prize, worth US$50,000, went to WinSci Pakistan, a small Lahore organisation that teaches girls robotics and walks them through scholarship applications. The person who accepted it on stage at the Science Museum in London was Maheera Abdul Ghani, a materials researcher who had only just finished her doctorate.
Ghani is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge, where she works on wafer scale dielectrics for atomically thin semiconductors. She is also a cofounder of WinSci Pakistan and, according to Nature Electronics, chief executive of Cambridge Dielectrix, a spin out working on dielectric technology for two dimensional semiconductors.
Her story matters because it runs on two tracks that rarely meet. One is a hard problem in semiconductor manufacturing. The other is a plain, practical effort to widen the pipeline of girls who study science in Pakistan. Forbes recognised the combination in May 2026, when it placed her on its 30 Under 30 Asia list in the healthcare and science category.
From Lahore to Darmstadt and Grenoble
Ghani's route to Cambridge ran through Lahore, Darmstadt and Grenoble. According to her profile on the website of Cambridge's 2D Materials and Devices Group, she took a BEng with honours in metallurgical and materials engineering at the University of Engineering and Technology Lahore in 2019. She graduated with the highest grade average in her department and a Pakistan Tobacco Company gold medal, and she had studied on a high merit scholarship from 2018.
An Erasmus Mundus scholarship, awarded in 2019, then took her to a double master's in functionalised advanced materials engineering at TU Darmstadt in Germany and Grenoble INP in France, completed in 2021. The programme is a European one, built around studying in more than one country, and her group profile lists three pieces of research from it. In 2019 she prepared ion irradiated polymer samples for nanowire fabrication at the GSI Helmholtz Centre. In 2020 at Darmstadt she worked on a machine learning model to predict band gaps in two dimensional materials. In 2021 she made transparent electrodes from silver nanowire networks for solar cells in a CNRS laboratory in Grenoble.
None of that was a straight line to Cambridge. It was three countries, three kinds of materials problem and one steady interest in what happens at the surface of a thin film. The move to England followed in 2021.
Atomically thin, and awkward to insulate
In 2021 she joined Professor Manish Chhowalla's group at the Department of Materials Science and Metallurgy in Cambridge, which her profile lists as the start of her PhD. The group works on ultra low power electronics built from two dimensional materials and studies the atomic interfaces between two dimensional semiconductors, metals and oxide insulators.
Her field concerns crystals a few atoms thick that could let transistors keep shrinking after silicon runs out of room. The practical obstacle is the dielectric, the insulating layer in a transistor, which is hard to grow cleanly on a surface that thin. A defective interface leaks charge and spoils the device.
The department said in October 2025 that her postdoctoral work focuses on wafer scale dielectrics for atomically thin semiconductors. Wafer scale is the important phrase. A laboratory can make a good device on a flake the size of a fingernail, but a chip industry needs the same quality across a whole wafer. The group's website lists a Nature Electronics paper from 6 October 2025 on a clean van der Waals interface between the high k dielectric zirconium oxide and molybdenum disulfide. It does not say which of the listed papers Ghani wrote, and this magazine does not claim she is an author of it, but it shows the kind of problem the group is working on.
A doctorate and a spin out
Forbes, in the profile accompanying her place on its 30 Under 30 Asia 2026 list, said she graduated from Cambridge with a PhD in materials science in 2025. A Q&A published by Nature Electronics on 15 December 2025 introduced her as chief executive of Cambridge Dielectrix and discussed her outreach work, the founding of WinSci Pakistan, and the challenges and opportunities in developing dielectric technologies for two dimensional semiconductors.
Little else about the company is public, and no funding has been announced. The magazine is therefore careful to say only that the company exists, that she leads it, and that it works on the same dielectric problem as her research. Whether it will become a commercial business is not something the record can yet answer.
Three founders and a Lahore programme
WinSci Pakistan is a family affair. Its team page lists three founders: Maheera, Maheen Abdul Ghani, who is studying data intensive software systems in Finland, and Noor Abdul Ghani, a machine learning engineer in Singapore. The organisation is based in Lahore and run largely by student interns, according to the same page.
By its own description, WinSci was founded in 2020 as a Lahore based nongovernmental organisation that runs STEM courses, mentoring and scholarship guidance for young people, with a focus on girls from underserved communities. Arab News, reporting the Forbes list on 28 May 2026, quoted the stated mission as advancing science education by inspiring curiosity and fostering innovation.
What a small organisation actually does
The events page shows a programme built from short, practical courses. There is a two day robotics bootcamp on Arduino programming with Lincoln Corner and the UET Mechatronics Club on 25 and 26 April 2024, a five day logical reasoning and programming bootcamp at Al Bayan School in Lahore, a three day data science bootcamp in Python and machine learning, and a two week Python game development summer camp for O level and matric girls. A robotics summer camp, three weeks long, lists the Alam Bibi Fund as a partner.
Alongside the camps sit the webinars. Its pages list sessions on master's scholarship applications, on preparing applications for the Global UGRAD and SUSI exchange programmes with the Community Development Initiative, on career counselling with the US Department of State and IREX, on freelancing, cyber security with a speaker from PITB, and on financial independence. A four week online scholarship series is described as ongoing. The only attendance figure the site gives is about 2,500 people at the 2025 Khwarizmi Lahore Science Mela.
Nature's citation put it plainly: the organisation creates opportunities for disadvantaged young people, especially girls, to excel in science through STEM courses, mentorship and scholarships. The scholarship series is the most telling item on the list, because scholarships are how Ghani herself reached Europe, through her Erasmus Mundus award.
A panel in London
The award is given to an individual or organisation that expands access to, and long term participation in, science for women and girls. It was presented at the Science Museum in London in the eighth year of the partnership between The Estée Lauder Companies and Springer Nature. The runner up was Technolochicas, led by Astrid Viveros.
Ghani also sat on a panel on women's careers in STEM titled Where Are We Now, alongside Dame Lesley Fallowfield and Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu, according to The Estée Lauder Companies' account of the evening. It is a modest detail, but it shows how the award changed her position: the cofounder of a small Lahore programme was on stage in London as a speaker.
The record so far
She has given no extended interview that this magazine could find, so the record is what the institutions around her have said: a scientist working on a hard problem in semiconductor manufacturing, who spent her doctoral years quietly building a pipeline for the girls who might follow her.
The open questions are practical. Can WinSci Pakistan grow beyond a student run operation with the prize money and the attention, and can Cambridge Dielectrix turn a laboratory result into a product? Neither the prize organisers nor WinSci have said how the money will be spent. Both efforts depend on time that she has to share with a research post. What the awards and the list show is that those who judge science already take both seriously.
