Lahore: Shumaila successfully defended her doctoral dissertation titled "Construction Approach to Semantic Prosody of Near-Synonym Verbs: A Corpus-based Study" at an open defense organized by the Directorate of Advanced Studies & Research. Her research, supervised by Dr. Tahir Saleem, was examined in a session that underscored its significance and academic rigour.

According to University of Central Punjab, the Defense Committee for Shumaila's dissertation included Prof. Dr. Khalid Manzoor Butt as the Convener, with Dr. Bushra Sani and Dr. Shafqat Hussain Zaidi serving as External Examiners, and Dr. Muhammad Aslam as the Internal Examiner. The session featured a comprehensive question-and-answer segment, promoting a meaningful academic discussion.