Dr Shaheen Motala-Timol is a higher education and quality assurance scholar-practitioner. She is currently heading the Regulatory Affairs and Accreditation Division at the Higher Education Commission in Mauritius. Dr Motala-Timol is also an independent higher education consultant for government agencies and serves as an external quality assurance specialist for international regulatory agencies such as the Oman Academic Accreditation Authority and the Turkish Higher Education Quality Council.

She was a Visiting Scholar at the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College in 2017 and a Fellow at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Rwanda under the InterAcademy Partnership Africa Science Fellowship in 2019.