Fatima Tuz Zahra is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she founded and directs AIRELab (the Artificial Intelligence, Race, and Evaluation Lab). An applied developmental psychologist by training, she designs and evaluates interventions and policies that build human learning, thinking, and development in contexts shaped by displacement, inequality, and artificial intelligence.
Her South Asia research centers on Rohingya refugee communities in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, where she studies employment, psychosocial wellbeing, fathers’ caregiving, and young children’s development. This work appears in the American Economic Review and Early Childhood Research Quarterly and continues through sustained partnerships with research organizations in Bangladesh.
A parallel strand of her work examines what generative AI does to human thinking and labor, and who bears the cost. The instructional model she developed for that purpose received the 2025 AAAI/ACM SIGAI Innovative AI Education Award. She is a member of the inaugural North American cohort of the Google Higher Education Faculty AI Fellowship.
Visit Dr. Zahra’s website here.
Visit Dr. Zahra’s LinkedIn page here.
Current Projects:
Employment, paternal caregiving, and child development among Rohingya refugee families in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh
AI and digital skills policy for education systems in Bangladesh and Rwanda, with attention to whose vision of the future these policies encode
Culturally responsive experimental design: methodology for randomized trials that treat cultural context as central
Recent Publications:
Zahra, F. T., Sunny, S., Bolisetty, S., Yoshikawa, H., Iqbal, Y., & Kim, S. (2026). Fathers’ engagement with and perceptions of child play: Evidence from the Rohingya camps of Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 75, 180–189. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2026.01.005
Hussam, R., Kelley, E. M., Lane, G., & Zahra, F. (2022). The psychosocial value of employment: Evidence from a refugee camp. American Economic Review, 112(11), 3694–3724. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20211616Hussam, R., Kelley, E. M., Lane, G., & Zahra, F. (2022). The psychosocial value of employment: Evidence from a refugee camp. American Economic Review, 112(11), 3694–3724. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20211616
