Nisa is a fifth-year doctoral candidate in Information Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, co-advised by Dr. Sheena Erete and Dr. Catherine Knight Steele. In addition to the CReED Lab, Nisa is a graduate fellow of the Black Communication & Technology Lab and a 2023-2024 DISCO Network graduate scholar. In her dissertation work, she applies STS theory and Caribbean cultural studies to frame the social media discourse making meaning of scientific productions of racial identity. She is a multidisciplinary critical scholar whose research interests lie at the intersection of race, biotechnology, art, and postcolonial theory. She also does research on informal learning spaces. She has published at several venues including ACM CHI, Public Understanding of Science, and Frontiers in Computer Science, and won the 2020 ALISE/Bohdan S. Wynar Research Paper award for the co-authored paper Positioning Vulnerability in Youth Digital Information Practices Scholarship: What are we Missing or Exhausting?. She has presented at AoIR 2023, 4S 2023, and the 2024 Stuart Hall International Conference. From 2021-2024 Nisa was a TA for the UMD Honors Humanities program, where she co-created curriculum, co-taught classes, and developed community-building programming for students. Nisa holds an M.S. in Human-Centered Computing from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, a B.A. in Art Education from Towson University, a B.A. in International Area Studies from Drexel University, and an A.A. in Studio Art from Howard Community College. In her free time, she enjoys building Lego sets with her husband and watching anime, bad reality tv, and documentaries

Personal Website: https://nisaasgaralihoffman.com/