Hashim Salar
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Innovation

A national science competition and the trial that tests whether it works, websites I built for teaching, and clinical tools for hospitals with few staff and little equipment.

National Science Bowl Pakistan

National Science Bowl Pakistan is a fast, buzzer-based team competition in science and mathematics for school students. It has always been free to enter, and runs with the Pakistan Innovation Foundation and the Centre for Economic Research in Pakistan (CERP) with a largely volunteer team.

I first met it as a competitor, as a runner-up at the national event in Islamabad and then as captain of the winning team at the National STEM School camp, where Professor Asim Ijaz Khwaja of Harvard Kennedy School was testing whether the American Science Bowl would work in Pakistan. Since November 2021 I have been its Co-President and have led four national iterations, from legal registration and governance to running the regional and national rounds.

It now brings together more than 1,000 teams and 5,000 students from over 100 institutions, 42 percent of them girls, and has been piloted in remote parts of Balochistan.

  1. 2018 Runner-up, National Science Bowl, Islamabad
  2. 2019 Captain of the winning team, National STEM School camp
  3. 2021 Co-President of National Science Bowl Pakistan
  4. 2023 Agency Fund grant awarded for a randomised evaluation
  5. 2026 Trial rollout across 185 schools of The Citizens Foundation

Built for schools without equipment

Pakistani schools often have unreliable internet and little equipment, buzzer systems are expensive, and online play lets network delay decide who appears to have pressed first. I co-authored the product requirements and designed and coded the competition app with CERP Labs to work around each of these.

  • Runs offline on ordinary devices and logs every response and response time
  • A buzzer that uses synchronised device clocks to decide who pressed first, so phones replace buzzer hardware and a slow connection no longer costs a student the question
  • Registration automated with Google Apps Script, with live dashboards of participation and match activity
  • A question bank of more than 2,000 questions

The randomised trial

Question
Does competing in a science competition change a student’s trajectory, or does it only reward students who were already going to succeed?
Design
Randomised controlled trial, randomised at school level
Setting
185 schools of The Citizens Foundation, Pakistan
Outcomes
STEM engagement, academic performance and career aspirations
Principal investigator
Professor Asim Ijaz Khwaja, Harvard Kennedy School
Partners
Centre for Economic Research in Pakistan, The Citizens Foundation, CERP Labs
Funding
The Agency Fund, Global Math Talent Grant, US$183,796, awarded April 2023
My role
Co-wrote the funded proposal; member of the research team; product lead for the trial app
Status
Implementation and data collection under way in three phases during 2026. No results have been reported yet.

Websites I’ve built

Teaching tools and software I designed and wrote myself, each made to fix a specific gap I ran into.

  • Vascular Surgery Field Guide

    A mobile-first guide to the vascular surgery service for residents, sub-interns and students: the first day, rounds and charting, the CTV ICU, on call, open and endovascular operations, wires and devices, the questions you will be asked and a quick reference.

    Built during my vascular surgery sub-internship at the University of New Mexico, first as a manual I could read between cases.

  • OnlyStats

    A visual introduction to statistics for medical research: three workshop sessions, nine chapters and 27 interactive simulations, from descriptive statistics to logistic regression, with SPSS and Stata guidance.

    Built for the Student Research Forum’s statistical analysis workshop at the Aga Khan University.

    Workshop chapters need the participant password.

  • National Science Bowl Pakistan match app

    The offline-first competition app that runs NSBP matches and the trial: a buzzer that uses synchronised device clocks to decide who pressed first, and a log of every answer by student and response time.

    Product requirements and code co-written with CERP Labs for the Agency Fund trial.

    • Link to add

  • This website

    A static Astro site whose structure follows a CONSORT trial flow diagram, with searchable publication and presentation registers and a CV generated from the same data.

    Designed and built in 2026.

Clinical tools

Each was built for a setting where the usual answer, more staff or more equipment, isn’t available.

  • Surgical site infection risk model

    A neural network that estimates the risk of surgical site infection from routinely available laboratory markers, deployed on a public web platform so clinicians and researchers can use it.

    My role
    Built and deployed the model
    Recognition
    2nd place and PKR 75,000, Innovation to Incision Hackathon, AKU Annual Surgical Conference, March 2024
    Link
    Demo or repository link to add

  • Early warning for sepsis in intensive care

    A neural network that reads longitudinal vital signs and laboratory results to flag deterioration earlier than standard scoring systems, designed to raise alerts inside the electronic health record with fewer false alarms.

    My role
    Built the model and presented the technical framework to WHO experts
    Recognition
    Most Innovative Team, WHO DISRUPT Quality of Care Hackathon, Milan, April 2024
    Link
    Demo or repository link to add

  • Baat Karo: burnout support for healthcare workers

    A burnout early-warning and support system for Pakistani healthcare workers: peer debriefing over WhatsApp with Urdu and English sentiment analysis, workload dashboards and an XGBoost risk score.

    My role
    Led technical development
    Recognition
    1st place and PKR 300,000, RUFAYDA Anti-Burnout Hackathon, April 2026
    Link
    Demo or repository link to add