Impact
I have been fortunate to spend my career on projects that try to improve life for people living in poverty, and I take none of it for granted. None of this work was mine alone. I did it alongside some of the hardest-working students and most brilliant colleagues I could have hoped for, and I learned something from every one of them.
My deepest gratitude goes to the people who welcomed my teams and me into their homes, spoke openly about their struggles, and let us design technologies that might help others like them.
I am grateful, too, to the governments, research agencies, and philanthropic organizations that funded this work, the universities that hosted these grants, and the reviewers who examined it, for trusting us with the responsibility to design and deploy these technologies and sociotechnical systems.
Punjab, Pakistan · 2015–2020 · Principal investigator · Funded by DFID through the Sub-National Governance Programme, and by the Gates Foundation
Har Zindagi ("Every Life Matters") began with a design contest. In 2013 the Gates Foundation invited redesigns of the home-based child health record, the card a family keeps through six vaccination visits and a vaccinator reads at each one. Our team at Information Technology University entered a bright yellow, laminated booklet that showed the next-visit date through a slit in its closed cover and used carbonless copies to carry each visit into a digital record. When the Sub-National Governance Programme (SNG, a DFID grantee) funded us to build the idea out, I led the Har Zindagi team in partnership with Punjab's Expanded Program on Immunization, pairing a card shaped by what families and vaccinators told us with an Android app that vaccinators used to create digital records in the field. Two Gates Foundation grants later led me to ask a harder question: whether the data such a system produces can be trusted.
Lahore, Pakistan · 2017–2020 · U.S. principal investigator · Funded by the Pakistan-U.S. Science and Technology Cooperation Program
Many families in Lahore collect their drinking water from public filtration plants: neighborhood taps run by the city's water utility, WASA Lahore, where the water is free and carried home in jerry cans. A utility that can see each plant at work can keep the water flowing, fix a leaking tap the day it starts, and plan where the next plant should go. Together with Dr. Tauseef Tauqeer at Information Technology University, Lahore, I co-led a three-year project to build a low-cost sensing unit that gives the utility that view, and to pair the engineering with fieldwork on how low-income residents of Lahore get their water.
Pakistan · 2016–2024 · Organizer, designer, co-principal investigator, and principal investigator across four phases · Funded by the UNICEF Innovation Fund, the NIH Fogarty International Center, and the Gates Foundation
In Pakistan a pregnant woman's care runs through her husband: in our survey of 199 expectant couples in rural Punjab, 85 percent of husbands took part in decisions about their wife's healthcare, yet only 56 percent had ever sought out information on maternal health. Super Abbu ("Super Dad") is a hotline that lets a man with any phone, and no need for literacy or internet, record a question for a doctor, hear the answer in private, and listen to other fathers' questions and stories. It began as a student team's idea at a design summit I organized in 2016 and grew, over four grants, into a service that has reached more than 27,000 men in Urdu and Pashto. I have been part of it at every stage.
Pakistan · 2020–2026 · Co-principal investigator · Funded by the NIH Fogarty International Center
When Covid-19 reached Pakistan in March 2020, the people least likely to see a government advisory were those without internet, without literacy, and without much reason to trust official sources. Baang is a voice-based social network, built by Agha Ali Raza's lab, that people use over an ordinary phone call to record and hear each other's posts. On April 2, 2020, Ali, Arman Rezaee, Sarojini Hirshleifer, and I, who were already collaborating on the Super Abbu evaluation, relaunched Baang as a channel for reliable Covid information. Over six months it took half a million calls from 12,000 people across Pakistan, who listened to official guidance, argued with it, shared it with friends, and told the government what they thought of its lockdowns.
Southeast Michigan · NSF CTW project, 2021–2025 · Co-principal investigator · Scam prevention research · Google Academic Research Award, 2025 · Principal investigator
Training trusted neighbors to help families use online services. The program trained 41 Community Tech Workers across Detroit and Afghan communities in Southeast Michigan, with subsequent work on AI training and scam prevention.
Karachi, Pakistan · 2024–2027 · Principal investigator · Funded by the University of Michigan Center for Global Health Equity
Research with university students in Pakistan on digital abuse and barriers to seeking help, informing the development of prevention and support with students and local partners.
