Nisa is a PhD student 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 DISCO Network graduate scholar. In her current work, she applies STS theory and Caribbean Existentialism to frame the social media discourse making meaning of scientific productions of racial identity. She is an interdisciplinary 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?. Nisa is a TA for the UMD Honors Humanities program, where for three years she has been co-creating curriculum, co-teaching classes, and developing 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/