Nadia Monira Mohamed Taib is a PhD candidate at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP) under the supervision of Professor Rainer Kattel and Dr. Kate Roll. As a member of Malaysia’s Administrative and Diplomatic Service, she has served in different capacities for the Government of Malaysia since 2004. Her recent role was as the Private Secretary to the 7th Prime Minister of Malaysia from 2018 to 2020, where her responsibilities focused on public management reform. From 2004 to 2018, she has worked closely with four Cabinet Ministers, delivering strategic assignments in the public works, tourism and culture and higher education ministries.

Domestically, she has led substantial human capital development projects for the tourism industry during the rolling out of Government Economic Transformation Programme (2011-2015) - a major policy drive in a bid to elevate Malaysia’s status as a high-income nation. At the global front, she was highly involved in coordinating the country’s international relations with multilateral organisations namely UN, UNWTO, UNESCO, APEC, OECD and OIC for the tourism and higher education sector (2015-2018).

Nadia holds a Bachelor in Quantity Surveying (Honours) from the Faculty of Built Environment, the University of Malaya and a Master in Public Administration (MPA) from the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy (LKYSPP), National University of Singapore (NUS). She was awarded the LKYSPP Gold Medal for Best Governance Study Project during her MPA — due to the promising impact on a proposed digital transformation policy project to improve socio-economic conditions in North Jakarta, Indonesia.

Her current research at IIPP focusses on the nexus between digital transformation and developmental state from the East Asian perspective specifically looking at the public sector in Malaysia. Since 2021, Nadia has also served as a Postgraduate Teaching Assistant (PGTA) for the module ‘Creative Bureaucracies’ led by Rainer Kattel in the IIPP’s Master of Public Administration programme.