“My grace is sufficient for you, for My strength is made perfect in your weakness.”
Hi! This is me…
I am a Ph.D. student in the Lew Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University, where I study emerging technology as part of the social, communicative, and institutional systems through which people produce knowledge, make decisions, coordinate work, and understand the world around them.
My research is broadly sociotechnical and grounded in communication. I am interested in the relationships that form around AI systems, i.e. between people and machines, among people whose interactions are increasingly mediated by technology, between workers and organizations, between technical systems and institutional rules, and increasingly, among AI systems in the same social and information environments. I look at how these systems reshape relationships, professional roles, cultural practices, forms of expression, and the ways people understand themselves and others.
Some of my work examines these questions through journalism, organizations, and knowledge infrastructures. Other projects examine AI systems and governance frameworks across different social and institutional contexts, particularly in Africa and the Global South.
Federal Polytechnic Oko to Graduate Study
My academic journey began at Federal Polytechnic Oko, where I earned a Higher National Diploma in Mass Communication. I was trained in journalism, broadcasting, public communication, and media production.
During my master’s degree in Communication Studies at Northern Illinois University, I became especially interested in AI’s growing role in producing, interpreting, and communicating information. My master’s research was advised by Dr. Andrea L. Guzman, whose work in Human–Machine Communication gave me a way to think seriously about the changing relationships between people and intelligent machines.
For my thesis, Journalists’ Perception of Artificial Intelligence: The Case of Nigerian Newsrooms, I interviewed 18 news workers including reporters, editors, producers, fact-checkers etc about how AI was becoming part of their everyday work.
My interest was in the changes around AI use. These journalists talked about speed and creative assistance alongside verification, professional judgment, cultural accuracy, newsroom expectations, and systems that sometimes struggled with contexts they are familiar with. AI was entering an existing social and professional environment, where journalists had to decide when to trust it, when to question it, how to work around its limitations, and how much space it should occupy within their professional practice.
That study changed the kinds of questions I subsequently started asking about technology. But for the most part, journalism was where I first encountered many of these questions, and they have since expanded. Africa is key to how I think about these questions. Specifically, because many ideas about technological progress, adoption, risk, and responsibility spread in a supposedly universal manner. Focusing on African contexts gives me a place to examine those assumptions, and think about technological futures from contexts that have been mostly peripheral to their making.
Doctoral Research at Temple
I am now pursuing my Ph.D. under the guidance of Dr. Andrew Iliadis at Temple University’s Lew Klein College of Media and Communication.
My doctoral work expands many of the questions that first brought me to the study of technology and society.
Across my projects, I typically ask:
- How do emerging technologies change the ways people communicate, produce knowledge, and make decisions?
- How do people decide when to trust, question, resist, or rely on intelligent and automated systems?
- What happens to professional judgment and expertise as more forms of work become mediated by machines?
- How do relationships between people and machines change as technologies become more communicative and autonomous?
- How are responsibility and risk distributed across people, organizations, institutions, and technical systems?
- How do technologies carry particular assumptions about people, knowledge, and society into the environments where they are used?
- What happens when technologies move across cultural, political, and institutional contexts?
I approach these questions in different ways depending on the problem.
Current Research
My research broadly examines the relationships among technology, people, knowledge, and institutions. Some of the questions I am currently working through include:
Human–machine judgment: I am developing work with synthetic users and persona-based evaluators to examine whether their judgments are stable and whether machines can meaningfully represent human experiences in evaluation.
Agentic systems and failure: I am studying how failures move through multi-agent AI systems, including how small failures become system-level problems and how coordination and redundancy might improve recovery.
Machines and knowledge: I am interested in the growing role of machines in producing, organizing, and evaluating knowledge. My current work examines how AI-generated information reenters the information environment and becomes part of later outputs, raising questions about sources, authority, and what we eventually accept as knowledge.
AI, journalism, and representation: My published and ongoing research examines journalists’ experiences with AI, deepfakes in African news coverage, and the role of algorithms in shaping how Africa is represented and made visible online.
Technological futures and the Global South: I study how governments, technology companies, and other institutions imagine the Global South within emerging technological futures, particularly through narratives of AI expansion, development, opportunity, and responsibility.
Risk, responsibility, and organizations: I examine how organizations define and communicate technological risk, who gets to decide that something is a problem, and where responsibility is placed when intelligent systems fail or cause harm.
These projects are at different stages, from published work and ongoing empirical studies to newer ideas I am still building. mpirical studies and newer projects that I am currently building.
Methods & Research Practice
My research combines computational, qualitative, and mixed methods, depending on the questions I am asking. I work with text and network analysis, statistical modeling, computational experiments, AI evaluation, interviews, and discourse analysis.
I primarily work in Python and R to build the datasets, code, and workflows my projects require, using tools like pandas, spaCy, scikit-learn, quanteda, Jupyter, Git, and GitHub. I also have experience with interviews, thematic analysis, discourse analysis, and human studies.
Beyond Research
Before beginning my Ph.D., I worked across journalism, communications, education, and corporate environments. These experiences still shape how I approach technology and the questions I ask.
Journalism taught me to think seriously about information, verification, trust, and the realities of working under institutional constraints. My experiences in communications, education, and corporate settings exposed me to very different ways that people coordinate, make decisions, share knowledge, and adapt to new technologies.
Having worked across these spaces also keeps me interested in the distance between how technologies are imagined and how they become part of everyday practice. People interpret them, work around them, resist them, depend on them, and sometimes use them in ways their designers never anticipated.
Where I Am Headed
I want to build a research career around understanding the changing relationships among people, technology, organizations, and knowledge. Artificial intelligence is a major part of that work today, alongside my general interest in emerging technologies and the social systems that develop around them.
I want my work to contribute to how we understand, evaluate, and live with increasingly intelligent technologies, especially as the boundaries between human and machine communication, knowledge, judgment, and action become harder to draw.