I am a PhD Candidate at the University of Michigan's School of Information in Ann Arbor.​​

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As a qualitative socio-technical researcher in Human-Computer Interaction, Human-AI Interaction, and Social Computing, I use human-centered approaches to recommend alternative platform governance designs that account for the social, linguistic, and geopolitical realities of people living in culturally and politically complex countries in the Global South. I explore how platform governance policies perform for marginalized populations in the Global South who use social media to document high-stakes events they are experiencing, such as violence, mass death events, and human rights violations. My work articulates the catastrophic human cost of neglecting marginalized populations who use social media in non-normative ways, while highlighting the alternative ways that marginalized social media users in these contexts construct alternative infrastructures of care to repair perceived platform failures. I also articulate new forms of labor that marginalized populations are performing to circumvent opaque platform policies.

 

I have published research papers supported by funding from the National Science Foundation in top HCI and Social Computing venues such as the Proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery on Human-Computer Interaction. My research has been accepted to the ACM CHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW), and the ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work (GROUP). I am a 2026 recipient of the Robert J. Donia Graduate Student Fellowship by the Donia Human Rights Center at the University of Michigan, where my research will explore the experiences of ethnic minorities in Nigeria with Gen AI content. My prior research into the use of cost-effective messaging apps to create a model for news distribution that circumvents government repression was funded through my fellowship at the National Endowment for Democracy. My contributions in advancing digital rights, human rights, and press freedom in Nigeria have been featured by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and published by International Journalist Network (IJNet) and the Center for International Journalist Assistance (CIMA). I have been a recipient of the Reagan-Fascell Democracy fellowship at the National Endowment for Democracy, an Orange Knowledge Program Scholarship for a fellowship at the Radio Nederland Training Centre, a second-place winner of the African Women in Media Pitch Zone Award, a Climate Tracker Data Journalism Fellowship, and a Lagos State Undergraduate Scholarship for Indigenous Students. I have delivered presentations on press freedom, democracy, and authoritarianism in West Africa at the National Endowment for Democracy and have spoken on panels at the United States Institute of Peace and RightsCon. In my role as an award-winning journalist before starting my PhD, I worked as an investigative journalist and news editor for Sahara Reporters and with Tin City 104.3 FM, where I was an on-air personality and the deputy head of news and current affairs. I have also worked as an independent researcher for the BBC.

 

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