Her family moved to Rawalpindi in Pakistan in the upheaval caused by the British orchestrated "partition of India".

[2] After lecturing for several years at Viqar-un-Nisa Girls College in Rawalpindi, Quraishi traveled overseas on a Government of Pakistan scholarship.

Within three years she had obtained her doctorate from the University of Paris-Sud in Orsay, France for related work which was a "Study of callogenesis and organogenesis from explant of in vitro shoots in Solanum tuberosum var., BF-15".

Azra Quraishi also "successfully launched projects of micropropagation of banana, date palm,[3] and screening salt tolerance through tissue culture in local wheat and rice cultivars."

[2][1] Her contributions earned Azra Quraishi many awards: At a memorial ceremony in Islamabad on 26 November 2002, Badruddin Soomro, Chairman PARC, announced that the Institute of Agriculture Biotechnology and Genetics Research (IABGR) would be renamed in Quraishi's honour.