Dr. Fatima T. Zahra is an Assistant Professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and an applied developmental psychologist who studies the future of human learning and work in the age of artificial intelligence. Her research asks what AI is doing to human learning, thinking, and work—and who bears the cost. She investigates these questions across university classrooms, organizations, and humanitarian settings to generate evidence that informs policy and practice.

In classrooms, her Higher Order Thinking with Generative AI model teaches students to use AI as a partner for critical thinking instead of a substitute for it. The model received the 2025 Innovative AI Education Award from AAAI and ACM SIGAI. In evaluating programs and policies, she examines how AI is changing the production of evidence and the judgments that guide organizational and public decision-making, work for which she received the inaugural George Julnes Endowed Social Betterment Award from the American Evaluation Association. In humanitarian settings, her field research examines how children learn and how families, particularly fathers, support child development under crisis conditions, informing the design of AI-supported systems that improve family well-being in displacement.

Underlying this work is a shared methodological approach. Dr. Zahra develops culturally responsive experimental design, which strengthens rigorous evaluation in contexts where conventional measurement often falls short. Her randomized trials span U.S. university classrooms and South Asia. She recently contributed a framework for culturally responsive randomized controlled trials to a forthcoming Oxford University Press volume. She is also an Invited Researcher with J-PAL at MIT. Her coauthored work on the psychosocial value of employment among refugees appears in the American Economic Review.

Dr. Zahra earned her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and completed postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard Business School and the T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She founded the Artificial Intelligence, Race, and Evaluation Lab in 2023 and is a Google Higher Education Faculty AI Fellow. She works with education and technology ministries in Rwanda and Bangladesh, and serves on the editorial board of the American Journal of Evaluation.

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