About

I'm Mustafa Naseem, a Clinical Associate Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information. I study how technology can expand access to health information and support, and how gender norms and institutional practices shape its use. My work combines field research, system design, and experiments, primarily in Pakistan and with refugee communities in the United States.

Research and Impact

I have spent much of my career working with public institutions to develop services they can sustain and expand. The Punjab government adopted a modified version of our team's immunization card design for use across the province. At Michigan, I was the initial UX research and design lead for the MI Safe Start Map, a dashboard developed to inform the state government's COVID-19 reopening decisions.

These collaborations have also supported research on how public services operate. Our fieldwork documented the methods vaccination supervisors developed to detect falsified records. With Super Abbu, we ran experiments to establish which recruitment approaches brought people to a voice-based health service and kept them engaged. In our research on image-based abuse, we showed how threats involving non-sexual photographs could expose women to harm from family members, broadening what existing definitions of abuse accounted for.

I want the systems we build to be useful, and I want the research to explain why they work, where they fail, and what our field needs to reconsider. My current projects extend this work to technology-facilitated gender-based violence, AI-enabled scams, and community digital support. The Impact page describes the services and interventions that have developed from this research.

Teaching and mentorship

I want students to develop confidence in their own judgment and feel comfortable coming to me when they struggle. My parents expected a lot of me and made sure I had support along the way. I bring that approach to teaching through detailed feedback and opportunities to revise work.

"Though the material in this course was sometimes fairly challenging, I never felt lost or helpless."

— Student course evaluation, IT & Global Society, Fall 2019

I created Humanitarian Innovation: Co-Design for Social Impact to give students sustained experience collaborating with Afghan community members. Community consultants guide each team's work, while shared meals and exercises on power and bias help students examine their assumptions.

One-on-one mentorship is among the most rewarding parts of my work. Some students I have mentored now hold tenure-track faculty positions, and I have had the privilege of learning from them throughout our collaborations.

Read Eliya Emtiaz's profile of my teaching and research in The Michigan Daily.

Learning through co-design

From 2009 to 2018, I took part in the International Development Design Summit (IDDS), progressing from participant to organizer and instructor. I co-led three summits in Botswana (2015, 2016, and 2018) and was lead organizer of the 2016 Pakistan summit, where Super Abbu began.

The summits I helped organize brought together people from more than 20 countries, aged 17 to 82, with education ranging from unfinished secondary school to postdoctoral research. Facilitating these collaborations shaped my approach to co-design: adapting activities to different languages and literacy levels, addressing how gender and status affect whose ideas are heard, and sharing design decisions while respecting individual dignity and cultural context. These methodological concerns also inform our research on power differentials and cultural differences in co-design, which examines both the strategies facilitators use and the limits of what a workshop can change.

Institution Building

As one of the founding faculty at Information Technology University in Lahore, I helped establish the computer science department and develop its academic policies. This included undergraduate admissions, master's thesis assessment, and disciplinary procedures. Establishing these policies was a substantial part of my early faculty responsibilities, alongside teaching and developing a research program.

I co-founded the Innovations for Poverty Alleviation Lab (IPAL) with Samia Razaq, now Samia Ibtesam, and led its work on public services, including immunization. I secured £250,000 as principal investigator, and by the time I left for Colorado, the lab had more than 15 full-time research staff. My 2015 talk at re:publica offers a view of our work in Pakistan at the time.

With Max Krüger and Umar Shehzad, I also co-founded Make-i-stan. We wanted people from engineering, computing, and the arts to have somewhere to try things together. By the time I left, the makerspace was receiving roughly 300–500 visits a month.

I later returned to Colorado Boulder, where I had completed my master's as a Fulbright Scholar, as ICTD Expert-in-Residence. There, I helped run the master's program through recruitment, advising, and course planning. I joined Michigan in 2018, have served on the dean's advisory committee, and completed my PhD in Design Science in 2025. My CV has the fuller record of research, teaching, and service.

Bio for press and events

Mustafa Naseem is a Clinical Associate Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information. His research examines how technology can address information inequality in healthcare and digital safety, particularly among low-literate populations, women in patriarchal societies, and refugee communities. Combining qualitative research, participatory design, and randomized experiments, he develops and evaluates systems with communities and public institutions in Pakistan and the United States. His work spans voice-based health services, technology-facilitated gender-based violence, and community responses to online scams. Several projects have reached tens of thousands of people or produced designs adopted by government. His research has received support from NSF, NIH, the Gates Foundation, USAID, UNICEF, and Google. He holds a PhD in Design Science from the University of Michigan and a master's degree from the University of Colorado Boulder, where he was a Fulbright Scholar.