Md. Zahidul Hassan is one of the founder directors of DATA, currently leading the organization and holds the position of Managing Director. He also has served earlier as Managing Director of DATA for 12 more years in 6 separate terms. Hassan has extensive experience in survey based social research, and has designed and managed numerous panel survey that includes child, household, community, school, and institutional tracking for panel in Bangladesh.

Hassan has over 30 years of professional experience in, both quantitative and qualitative, survey research for policy level analysis, primarily focused on food and nutrition security, education and health achievement, agriculture, market, credit, migration and remittance, urban and rural livelihoods, and poverty.

As one of the founders of DATA, Hassan has experience working in all aspects of baseline and evaluation research, from study design, to quantitative and qualitative survey tools development, to data collection, supervision, and report preparation. Hassan also has a wealth of experience working for the World Bank, UN-OCHA, UNWFP, IFPRI, IPGRI, IDS at the University of Sussex, Tufts University FSNSP, IRIS Center at the University of Maryland, University of Bath, University of Kent, Bonn University, University of Waikato, University of Sydney, and many more.

In addition to the myriad contracts that he has supervised within DATA, he worked at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) head quarter at Washington DC, USA and analyzed collected data from the “Baseline study on Reaching Out-of- School Children (ROSC) project in Bangladesh”; and presented preliminary findings at the “Global Food for Education Monitoring and Evaluation Conference” organized by United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), held in Beijing. He also contributed as a resource person in a three-day workshop titled “Evaluating the impact of Biofortification Interventions” held in Washington, D.C., USA.

Before founding DATA in 1994, Hassan worked with the International Food Policy Research Institute and was a data analyst for the Save the Children (USA). Md. Zahidul Hassan, holds a Master’s Degree in Business Administration, is expert in data base management and statistical analysis that range from simple descriptive tables to highly technical multivariate analysis.

Zihad acts as a Project Manager and provides guidance and technical assistance in terms of necessary modifications of the survey instruments (checklist), training of survey enumerators and supervisors, and overall supervision of the checklists for ensuring the quality of data.