Ammar Khalid is a policy associate in the Justice Policy Center, where his work focuses on community corrections, jails, and drug policy reforms. Before joining Urban, Ammar was a consultant for the Urban Institute’s Center on International Development and Governance and the South Asia team in the World Bank's Social Protection and Jobs Global Practice. He has also worked with other teams in the World Bank (within the Social Protection and Jobs Global Practice, the Transport and ICT Global Practice, and the International Finance Corporation) and with the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation. He also has two years' experience working full time as a research assistant at the Institute of Economic and Development Alternatives, an economic research think tank in Pakistan, where he focused mainly on a research experiment aimed at introducing citizen-centric, urban policing practices in the Punjab province.

Ammar holds an MA in international economics and international development from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a bachelor’s degree in Economics from the Lahore University of Management Sciences. He is fluent in English and Urdu and has a working knowledge of French.