CS professor Sharifa Sultana, is the recipient of the Sheth Distinguished Faculty Award for International Achievement. Established by Illinois’ provost in 2001 and endowed by Jagdish and Madhuri Sheth in 2006, this award recognizes an Illinois faculty member for exemplary accomplishments in teaching, research, and public service in the international arena.
Established by Illinois’ provost in 2001 and endowed by Jagdish and Madhuri Sheth in 2006, this award recognizes an Illinois faculty member for exemplary accomplishments in teaching, research, and public service in the international arena.
Sultana graduated with a B.S. in electrical and electronic engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology in 2013. She earned an M.S. in 2020 from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in 2023 from Cornell University.
Her specialty is in human-computer interaction with a goal-oriented mindset to design, build, and deploy computing technologies to help improve the lives of underserved communities. Her novel computer science methods have helped meet the challenges of marginalized Global South communities with limited resources head on. She goes beyond simply identifying the problems seen in these communities by establishing a deep and ongoing engagement with marginalized Global South countries, notably using a co-designed approach to ethnography (the recording and analysis of a culture or society). Over the last seven years, her computing applications in Bangladesh and Canada helped address critical identification, human rights, and challenges toward recognizing their identities, rights, and audial.
“Professor Sultana has worked tirelessly over the years with Bangladeshi policymakers, NGOs, and the US-based and Bangladeshi tech-industries, to improve the lives of marginalized communities of the Global South,” said Nancy M. Amato, Abel Bliss professor and director of The Grainger College of Engineering Siebel School of Computing and Data Science. “Her focus on poor women from rural communities in the Global South, in particular, is tremendously important. Her work has been has been recognized for its contributions to responsible computing and AI by the computing research community.”