Sameera Syed is the managing director of the Center for Social Norms and Behavioral Dynamics and a lecturer with the Master of Behavioral and Decision Sciences program at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a gender equality and global health practitioner with over 12 years of portfolio management experience at Penn, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in New York, the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) in Geneva, and Deloitte in Washington, DC—with fieldwork performed in Cote d'Ivoire, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Tunisia.
Sameera’s work focuses on utilizing human-centered, decolonized, and ethics-based approaches to designing and implementing impactful and sustainable behavior change interventions. She teaches a course titled Behavioral Change for Social Impact: A Human-Centered Approach, which examines a diverse array of behavioral change interventions spanning a variety of topics in social impact and case studies from across the world.
Sameera holds a master’s degree in international economics and South Asia studies from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), and a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC).
