Research, design, community leadership, and technical work across human-centered AI, neurotechnology, and social impact.
Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
Ph.D. thesis: Creating Caring Technologies: Navigating the Fractured Infrastructures of Digital Ecosystem in Immigrant-based Nonprofits.
University of Toronto
M.A.Sc. thesis: Investigating the Efficacy of Meditation and Mental Rehearsal on EEG BCI Performance in a Pediatric Context.
University of Toronto
University of Tehran
B.Sc. thesis: A Study on the Learning Disorders of Addict Individuals Using Computational Modeling in Reinforcement Learning Framework.
Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto · Full-time
Lead a multi-phase UX and human-centered AI research program examining how nonprofit leaders, volunteers, donors, and community members interact with digital platforms and AI systems.
Conduct foundational, generative, and evaluative research using semi-structured interviews, surveys, participatory design, prototype feedback, and qualitative and quantitative analysis.
Mapped more than 120 nonprofit and charitable technology platforms to identify infrastructure gaps, underserved users, and emerging opportunities and risks associated with AI.
Conducted an in-depth interview study with 50+ participants to understand trust, exclusion, misinformation, accessibility, platform visibility, and organizational capacity within nonprofits.
Designed and evaluated AMINA, an inclusive AI-assistant product supporting nonprofit discovery, donor communication, credibility assessment, multilingual access, community validation, and organizational capacity building.
Translated research findings into design requirements and recommendations for AI-powered products.
Contributed to the development and analysis of a large-scale dataset of COVID-19-related anti-Asian social-media content, combined with computational machine learning and NLP analysis of online harm.
Bahar Charity · Full-time
Co-founded and co-led a volunteer-run nonprofit initiative supporting underprivileged children, helping organize more than 50 fundraising and awareness campaigns and mobilize more than CAD 75,000 in student setting in direct and indirect donations.
Designed and coordinated end-to-end service experiences spanning community-need identification, campaign development, volunteer coordination, donor communication, fundraising, event delivery, and post-campaign engagement.
Identified recurring challenges experienced by donors, volunteers, organizers, and beneficiary communities and redesigned processes and communication touchpoints to improve participation, trust, and coordination.
Designed and managed the organization’s website and social media channels, connecting online outreach with fundraising campaigns and community events.
Facilitated frequent meet-ups about social impact and entrepreneurship, gathering a community of like-minded people.
Baycrest Health Sciences · Full-time
Designed, developed, and deployed a scalable conversion pipeline that standardized large neuroimaging datasets according to the international Brain Imaging Data Structure standard, using Python, Docker, and Bash.
Delivered a production system adopted across the research hospital ecosystem in Ontario.
Contributed to the development of multivariate methods for identifying outliers and data-quality problems in complex healthcare datasets.
Facilitated monthly deep-learning sessions, supporting knowledge sharing across the research team.
Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital
Designed and evaluated an audio-tactile brain-computer interface that enabled children with disabilities to interact with and potentially control their environments through EEG-based input.
Planned and conducted more than 25 research sessions with pediatric participants, combining participant feedback, physiological data collection, and system-performance analysis.
Investigated how mindfulness meditation and mental rehearsal affected brain-computer-interface performance in pediatric contexts.
Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital
Using machine learning, a set of recorded accelerometer signals for healthy participants were classified into a cough vs. non-cough group with the best classifier accuracy of 99%. The dataset consisted of cough, swallow, speech, head movement, tongue out, tongue to left, tongue to right and rest signals. The applied classifiers were artificial neural networks (ANN), Support Vector Machines (SVM), and Naïve-Bayes.
CSC318 Design of Interactive Computational Media (Teaching Assistant), Fall 2022, Summer 2022, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
CSC2612 Computing and Global Development (Teaching Assistant), Winter 2021, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
CSC108 Introduction to Computer Programming (Teaching Assistant), Winter 2022, Winter 2021, Fall 2020, Summer 2020, Winter 2020, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
CSC300 Computer and Society (Teaching Assistant), Fall 2019, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto
Organizing and teaching workshops for high school students in the fields of biomedical engineering and assistive technology, Fall 2016–Fall 2017, Toronto, Ontario
Bioengineering Lab (Teaching Assistant), University of Tehran, Iran, Fall 2014
Intro to Calculus (Tutor), Nodet high school, Shiraz, Iran, 2009–2011
Intro to Physics (Tutor), Nodet high school, Shiraz, Iran, 2009–2011
Leader and volunteer at Bahar Charity Student Group, Toronto, Aug 2016 – present
Mental-health czar at DGP lab, University of Toronto, Sept 2019 – present
HCI meeting coordinator at DGP lab, University of Toronto, Sept 2019 – Jan 2020
Volunteer at Imam Ali Relief Society (NGO), Iran & Canada, Sept 2014 – June 2015
Innovation co-director at Engineering World Health Student Branch, University of Toronto, Jul 2016 – Aug 2017
Student representative of class of 2015, ECE department, University of Tehran, Sept 2012 – Aug 2014
Editorial board of Derang magazine (the official magazine of student union), ECE department, University of Tehran, Sept 2012 – Aug 2015
Active member of editorial board of Biotech Magazine (the official magazine of Iranian Society of Biomedical Engineering, student branch), University of Tehran, Iran, Jan 2014 – Sept 2016
Awarded for research on AI risks and opportunities for the immigrant-based nonprofits in the Global North.
Awarded to one PhD student each year in the Computer Science Department for excellent academic endeavors.
National Olympiad is the most important scientific student competition in Iran that consists of a series of competitions in which final round winners are awarded.