Nimra Ahmed

Short Bio

Hello! I'm Nimra, but you can call me Nims. I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at the People and Computing Lab. y research focuses on feminist design, social justice, and community-led approaches to technology and design, particularly in the context of forced marriage and gender-based violence.

I completed my PhD at UZH in July 2026, supervised by Elaine M. Huang, Ph.D. My dissertation, From Temporary Patches to Structural Repair: Feminist and Justice-Oriented Design for Forced Marriage and Gender-Based Violence, examines how we can design technologies and conduct research in ways that better support affected individuals and the communities and organizations working alongside them.

I also earned my BSc in Informatics at UZH, where my thesis Designing Technology for People Affected by Forced Marriage received the UZH Impact Award in 2022. You might have seen my work featured in OEC magazine – if you missed it, you can read more about it here and here.

During my PhD, I receivedDIZH funding for my project Supporting People Affected by Forced Marriage through Digital Transformation and joined the DSI PhD Excellence Program.

Beyond my research, I have been actively involved in building a more inclusive and supportive community at the Department of Informatics. I previously served as Junior Researchers' Representative Deputy at IfI and, in 2025, co-foundedWINZ (Women in Informatics Network Zurich), where I served as President. I now remain involved as part of the WINZ Advisory Board. In 2026, I was very happy to receive the Engagement Award for Special Commitment Alongside Studies for my work around community-building, mentoring, and supporting women and marginalized groups at IfI.

Research

My work sits at the intersection of feminist and critical HCI, design justice, and community-led research. Much of my research focuses on gender-based violence, where I study how technology becomes entangled in experiences of violence, help-seeking, recovery, and everyday life, and what it means to design with, rather than for, those affected.

More broadly, I am interested in how we can conduct research and design more responsibly with marginalized communities, particularly where there are unequal relations of power between researchers, institutions, community organizations, and those whose experiences we seek to understand. My work often sits between academia and activism and draws on participatory, trauma-informed, feminist, and justice-oriented approaches.

In my research, I:

• Examine how technologies support or constrain recognition, help-seeking, and life repair after gender-based violence.
• Design and sustain sociotechnical infrastructures that strengthen existing forms of care and community support.
• Work alongside community organizations to develop accountable, non-extractive, and long-term research collaborations.
• Study how power, culture, inequality, and institutional structures shape who gets to participate in research and on what terms.
• Critically examine research and design practice itself, including questions of ethics, responsibility, participation, and researchers' relationships with marginalized communities.

Across this work, I am interested in moving HCI beyond short-term technological interventions toward research and design practices that are more relational, accountable, sustainable, and oriented toward structural change.

Teaching

I currently teach the seminar Critical HCI: Feminism, Justice and Politics of Design. The seminar looks critically at the relationship between technology and society, including questions around power, inequality, marginalization, ethics, activism, and social justice. We draw on work from critical and feminist HCI, design justice, and related fields to think about not only what technologies do, but also whose interests they serve, who gets excluded, and how we might research and design differently.

If these are questions you are interested in, and you want to read and discuss research, debate ideas, question some of the assumptions we make about technology, and practice critical academic writing, take my seminar! :)

Mentoring & Supervision

I really enjoy supervising and mentoring students, especially those who are curious, motivated, and care about the wider impact of their work. I love to support students  in developing and conducting their research,  publishing their work, navigating academia, and figuring out where they want to go next :)

Selected Supervised Work:

• Mirjam Alexandra Weibel. Bachelor Thesis: "A Design Justice Approach to Developing a Self-Help Web Application in Collaboration with an NGO", in collaboration with the Fachstelle Zwangsheirat, DIS26.
• Sina Krumhard, Lukas Huber, Fabio Hausseneer. Masterproject: "SaferRave App: A Mobile App to Promote Safer and More Thoughtful Drug Consumption Practices", in collaboration with the DIZ, Student Design Competition at DIS26.
• Alina Vanessa Brüllhardt. Independent Study: "Quantitative Analysis of  Social Media's Role in Recognizing Abuse and Shaping Help-Seeking Pathways for Women Affected by Gender-Based Violence", in collaboration with the Fachstelle Zwangsheirat, published at CHI26. ACM-W Scholarship.
• Tim Portmann, Sandra Rosch, Larissa Senning, Thu Ahn Phan. Masterproject: "Design and Implementation of a Case Management System for Effective Counseling Support", in collaboration with the Fachstelle Zwangsheirat, published at CHI26. Best Paper Honorable Mention Award (5%), Special Recognition for Most Inspirational Research Practices.
• Natalia Obukhova. Master Thesis: "Because I can promise you: if you're studying people with lived experience of trauma, secondary trauma will happen: Researcher's safety in HCI research with traumatized communities", winner Semester Award HS24.
• Tim Schluchter. Master Thesis: "Exploring the Landscape of Mental Health Discourse on TikTok", published at CHI24 as Student Research Competition and MuC24.

I am currently open to supervising  theses, independent studies, and Master projects, but they should closely connect to my research.  If you are passionate about one of these areas, whether you already have an idea or are just curious to explore something together, feel free to reach out.