How a volunteer science charity in Lahore caught the attention of Nature

WinSci Pakistan is not a startup in the venture sense. It has no product, no investors and, as far as its website discloses, no revenue. It is a non governmental organisation based in Lahore whose stated vision is to inspire curiosity, foster innovation and create opportunities for young people in science. What makes it worth a close look is how far a small volunteer outfit got on very little money, and what it did when a large cheque finally arrived.

Finding the students

The organisation's customers, if the word applies, are school and university students in Punjab, and particularly girls. Its events page shows how it reached them: through partners rather than marketing. A two day robotics bootcamp in April 2024 was run with Lincoln Corner, an American cultural centre, and the UET Mechatronics Club. Panel discussions for International Day of Women and Girls in Science were held with the IEEE and IET student chapters at Information Technology University. Career webinars were sponsored by the US Department of State's Global UGRAD Pakistan programme through IREX. A stall at the Khwarizmi Lahore Science Mela 2025 put the organisation in front of roughly 2,500 attendees, according to its own event listing.

The programme list reads like a map of what a bright student in Lahore lacks and cannot easily buy: a five day programming bootcamp at Al Bayan School, a three week robotics summer camp, a CV review service, interview practice with a software engineer from Motive, and a four week scholarship series that walks applicants through UGRAD, SUSI, YES and graduate funding. Nearly all of it is free and much of it is delivered over Google Meet.

Money, or the absence of it

Until late 2025 WinSci's funding appears to have been in kind. Partners supplied venues, sponsors covered individual webinars, and the labour came from a rotating cast of interns listed on the team page, students from ITU, IBA, FAST and Punjab University. The three founders, sisters Maheera, Maheen and Noor Abdul Ghani, are respectively a Cambridge postdoc, a master's student in Finland and a machine learning engineer in Singapore, which suggests the organisation was run across three time zones in spare hours. Its age is uncertain: ProPakistani reported in October 2025 that it had been established five years earlier, while its website carries a 2024 copyright and the earliest fully dated event on it is April 2024.

The break came on 16 October 2025. Nature and The Estée Lauder Companies named WinSci Pakistan the winner of the Science Outreach category of the Nature Awards for Inspiring Women in Science, chosen from 480 submissions across both categories from more than 50 countries, according to the Springer Nature press release. The prize was US$50,000 to spend on the organisation's work, plus mentoring from Estée Lauder and publicity through Nature.

What the award bought

The most immediate return was attention. Nature Electronics ran a Q&A with Maheera Abdul Ghani on 15 December 2025. In May 2026 Forbes put her on its 30 Under 30 Asia list, citing the award directly, and the Pakistani press repeated the WinSci name in every report. What the money has bought is less visible. WinSci's website now lists Nature and Estée Lauder among its partners, but it publishes no figures on students reached, scholarships granted or budgets. Those gaps are worth remembering when the award is described, as it often is in Pakistani coverage, as an award to Ghani personally rather than to the organisation.

Still, the model is instructive for Pakistan's many small education initiatives. WinSci did not start with a grant. It started with a list of things its founders had needed on their own way out of Lahore and into European laboratories, then assembled the people and partners to give them away. The award recognised the pattern, not a balance sheet.