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Welcome to my bio!

I consider curiosity to be my learning engine, and my interest in solving problems is the reason for my perseverance. I am a very proactive, communicative, and dedicated person, while also always prioritizing responsibility and commitment.

About me

I am a Research Fellow at the Department of Human-Centred Computing, Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University. My research is at the intersection of community voice for those who are marginalised; participatory and co-design; diverse stakeholder collaborations (from policy makers to communities) for decision-making; people-centric technology, project, and policy commissioning, spanning domains such as global health, nutrition, agriculture, food systems and food insecurity, education, gender, cyber safety, international development, user-friendly technology adoption, participatory media (videos and podcasts), social innovation, and sustainable development. I use participatory design and action research approaches to understand marginalised community challenges in the real world and co-design solutions with diverse stakeholders where community voices stay at the central point of the decision-making (such as programs, policies, and technologies). Through participatory and design work, I ask how we might centre community voices regarding their needs, challenges, and priorities in innovation and intervention design. I put my work in the academic contexts of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Information and Communication Technology and Development (ICTD), Global Health, and Humanitarian and International Development.

My Human-Centric Interaction (HCI) and Information Systems work has been published in different top-tier HCI, ICTD and Information Systems venues, including ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors, Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), European Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (ECSCW), Information & Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD), iConference, Designing Interactive Systems (DIS). My global public health, food and nutrition-related work has also been published in reputed journals, including Nature Scientific Reports, Public Library of Science (PLOS), British Medical Journal (BMC), Frontiers, and Food and Nutrition Bulletin.

I am a public health practitioner and human-centric design-for-development researcher. I earned my PhD in research at the Department of HCC, Faculty of IT, Monash University. I was awarded as a Commonwealth scholar to pursue her advanced MSc in Global Health from Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, UK. Before starting my PhD, I had extensive professional experience working with marginalised communities, NGOs, INGOs, UN organisations and government agencies in Bangladesh. I was a public health practitioner and worked for INGOs and a UN organisation in Bangladesh. 

I started my career with an international research organisation, WorldFish South Asia Office, Bangladesh. WorldFish is one of the reputed research agricultural organisations of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) organisation. As a “Nutrition Research Associate” with WorldFish, I was closely involved and responsible for various world-class research programs from development to implementation in real-world settings. Then, I worked as a National Nutrition Specialist in the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (UNFAO), Bangladesh. As a national-level specialist in a UN organisation, I was responsible for liaising with multiple stakeholders, including government policymakers, academia, international organisations, NGOs, donors, think tanks and civil society in the agriculture, health and nutrition fields in Bangladesh. I also led a USAID-funded research project, ‘FAO-INGENAES’ collaboration work to do a study entitled “Mainstreaming nutrition into Agriculture Extension Services – lessons learned from selected FAO nutrition projects in Bangladesh” with the University of Illinois, USA. In my professional engagements, I worked closely with diverse groups, from programme donors and national-level policymakers to bottom-level disadvantaged communities in Bangladesh. I also worked for marginalised Indigenous people in Bangladesh. I was involved with numerous international programs funded by many international grant organisations, including WorldBank, USAID, IFAD and European Union. I also worked as the Monitoring, Evaluation and Research Manager at the Centre for Humanitarian Leadership (CHL), Deakin University where her role was to champion innovative methods to evaluate academic leadership programs and monitor implementation progress.