Amna Batool, Ph.D.

Postdoctoral Fellow | UX Researcher | Privacy | Responsible AI | Healthcare

Amna Batool, Ph.D.

Post-Doctoral Fellow, Notre Dame

Privacy | Healthcare | Responsible AI

About Me

Hi, I’m Amna 👋!!!

I’m a post-doctoral fellow at the Keough School of Global Affairs, University of Notre Dame, working towards developing trauma-informed, responsible AI systems for communities at risk.

I did my Ph.D. from the University of Michigan’s School of Information, under the supervision of Kentaro Toyama. My research sits at the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), privacy, healthcare, and Responsible AI. Broadly, I study how marginalized communities around the world interact with technology, and how we can design more inclusive, equitable, and ethical technological solutions.

To explore these questions, I use mixed methods, including interviews, ethnographic observations, surveys, content analysis, and system design. I bring feminist, cultural, and intersectional lenses to understand people’s lived experiences, and I draw on community-based participatory, user-centered, and problem-solving approaches to guide design.

Collaboration is at the heart of my work. I believe big problems can only be tackled together, so I partner with product managers, designers, engineers, and cross-sector stakeholders across public, private, government, and NGO spaces to shape product strategy, design, and engagement.

My projects have informed product design decisions, policy frameworks, and on-the-ground solutions for civil and government organizations. The impact ranges from developing theories and frameworks that explain existing and emerging phenomena to supporting communities in building digital literacy skills that improve everyday life. Ultimately, impact for me means that the people I work with feel seen, supported, and empowered through technology.

Along the way, I have received two Gold Medals for Distinguished Student, and published over 30 papers in ACM, IEEE, humanities and public health venues, seen my work cited more than 1,000 times, and received two Best Paper Awards and two Impact Awards in privacy and security.

Trauma-Informed, Responsible and Ethical AI

My work in responsible and ethical AI focuses on understanding how AI tools operate in real-world sociotechnical contexts and how they can be designed or governed to make AI systems more accountable, transparent, and safe. Broadly, I work across following interrelated themes:

Designing a responsible, and trauma-informed, LLM-Dirven support tool to provide immediate legal, technical, and psychological support to victims/survivors of image-based abuse and other forms of online harm.
Exploring and improving detection techniques for emerging harms such as sexual deepfakes, where technical advances must be coupled with ethical, legal, and policy considerations.
Studying the role of AI in high-stakes applications such as content moderation on large platforms like TikTok and Facebook, where questions of responsibility, governance, and user safety come to the forefront.
Examining the practical use and limitations of interpretability and fairness tools in industry to understand how practitioners actually integrate (or struggle to integrate) them into workflows. [Paper 🔗 ]

Privacy, Safety and Governance

Within privacy, my research explores women’s online privacy concerns through following interrelated themes:

Understanding the perceived and lived experiences of women facing online harms, with a particular emphasis on image-based abuse, including AI-generated content such as sexual deepfakes, and the role of local norms around gender, religion, and social values (e.g., honor, family reputation) in shaping the impact of these harms. [Papers: 1🔗, 2🔗, 3🔗, 4🔗, 5🔗]
Critically examining reporting and governance mechanisms of online harms, both online (e.g., platform content moderation policies and community standards) and offline (e.g., reporting processes involving law enforcement agencies and NGOs), to investigate how global platform policies intersect with local legal and cultural frameworks, and how these dynamics influence victims' access to justice. [Paper 🔗 ]
Understanding the role of social media in political movements through the study of the Nepal Gen Z movement, examining how young activists navigated platform censorship, repurposed digital infrastructures not originally designed for political mobilization, and coordinated collective action across local and diaspora networks.

Maternal and Child Healthcare

In healthcare, my work focuses on two key areas:

Designing culturally tailored digital interventions, such as SMS systems, voice-based platforms, and mobile applications, that address the health information needs of women and frontline healthcare workers while improving public service delivery in low-resource settings. [Papers: 1🔗, 2🔗, 3🔗]
Exploring the societal and structural barriers that limit women’s access to quality healthcare and information in marginalized communities. [Papers: 1🔗, 2🔗, 3🔗, 4🔗]