About
I work as a post-doctoral fellow at the Willy Brandt School of Public Policy at the University of Erfurt, Germany. My research primarily focuses on the fields of Digital Inclusion, eGovernment, Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D), and social media informatics.
As a principal investigator, I am responsible for Internationalisation and Digitalisation at the Brandt School. This involves establishing academic partnerships and developing digital learning solutions for our partners, both in the global South and the global North. The project is financed by the Thuringian State Ministry of Science, Economy, and Digital Society.
Previously, I worked as an assistant professor at Erfurt University and successfully raised approximately 1 million Euros in third-party funding for the Erfurt University. This included an intercultural exchange project funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). The project, titled “The Changing Role of Social Media,” focused on the critical discourse of digital social media. It involved curriculum development and joint academic and intercultural workshops between German and Pakistani academia. Additionally, I also worked on a German Federal Foreign Office funded project on peace ethics, with a focus on non-formal education and seminaries in Pakistan. In 2018, I co-launched an IT start-up in Erfurt, which focused on digitization for sustainable and energy-efficient buildings.
At the Willy Brandt School of Public Policy at Erfurt University, I teach courses on various topics, including Digital Inclusion, Governance/Human Rights in the Digital Age, ICT4D, Media Conflict & Society, Political Communication, Cyber Security, Digital Entrepreneurship, and eGovernment.
I have been a Heinrich Böll Doctoral Fellow at the University of Erfurt, where my research focused on Information and Communication Technologies in Pakistan. Since 2010, I have also been an external research associate at The Centre for Digital Development (formerly Centre for Development Informatics) at the University of Manchester, UK.
In addition, I also enjoy working on impact assessments and independent research consultancies in the field of education and digitalisation.