From Physics to Learning Design 

I am an academic, learning designer, and educational systems thinker with training and experience across physics, pedagogy, design thinking, and institutional leadership. Over the past fourteen years, I have worked across teaching, curriculum innovation, faculty development, and academic administration, with a particular focus on designing meaningful human learning experiences.

My work sits at the intersection of transdisciplinary thinking, relationship-rich teaching, and human-centered AI. I am interested in how institutions, classrooms, technologies, and lived experiences shape the ways humans learn, connect, and make meaning.

Originally trained as an experimental physicist at Sorbonne University, I worked in synchrotron-based research and experimental science before gradually moving into higher education innovation, curriculum design, and pedagogical transformation.

A major turning point in this journey came when I joined the founding faculty of Habib University, Pakistan’s first liberal arts and sciences university. Working within a newly imagined educational ecosystem opened up broader questions surrounding human learning, institutional design, transdisciplinary education, and the role of universities in rapidly changing societies.

Over time, my interests expanded beyond disciplinary boundaries and toward the design of educational experiences, faculty development systems, and institutional cultures that could better respond to human complexity, creativity, and change.

I have always appreciated different forms of expression and different ways of seeing the world. While studying physics during the day, I was hosting a rock and metal radio show at night. Later, while pursuing a doctorate in experimental physics, I also began formal training in theater and improvisation. Even after entering academic life more formally through teaching and research, I continued moving between these different worlds because each allowed me to understand people, communication, creativity, and learning from different perspectives.

Over time, I began noticing how deeply these experiences were shaping me as an educator. The world of physics and STEM trained me to think convergently: analytically, quantitatively, systematically, and with precision. Theater, improvisation, and radio introduced a different mode of engagement centered around narrative, audience, uncertainty, listening, timing, and human presence.

Storytelling demanded divergent thinking. Improvisation required adaptability and responsiveness. Radio required sensitivity to mood, pacing, attention, and audience engagement. Without consciously planning for it, many of these experiences became foundational to how I eventually approached classrooms, facilitation, and learning design.

Long before I formally encountered design thinking, these experiences had already made me highly sensitive to user experience and human-centered engagement. Over time, I realized that many of the instincts developed through storytelling, improvisation, and performance were deeply connected to the foundations of experiential learning, facilitation, and human-centered design.

Improvisation, in particular, gradually strengthened my ability to anticipate user experience while designing learning environments and systems. Over the years, it trained me to think more carefully about responsiveness, adaptability, failure points, emotional dynamics, participation, and the unpredictable ways humans interact with experiences. This eventually became deeply connected to how I approach facilitation, course design, institutional systems, and educational innovation more broadly.

Today, much of my work moves fluidly between systems thinking and deeply human-centered inquiry, examining both lived experiences and larger institutional structures. The combination of these seemingly different worlds became the foundation for my interest in designing learning environments that are participatory, reflective, creative, adaptive, and deeply attentive to the human experience of learning.

I have a longstanding interest in designing educational systems that can evolve, sustain themselves, and continue growing beyond the influence of any single individual. Much of my work has focused not only on individual courses or isolated teaching practices, but on creating cultures, frameworks, structures, and ecosystems that help institutions continuously reflect, adapt, and improve over time.

At Habib University, this led me to help build multiple interconnected initiatives around teaching, learning, and transdisciplinary education. I founded the Integrated Sciences and Mathematics program, established the Center for Pedagogical Excellence, created the R3 Teaching Talks series and Teaching Excellence Awards, and developed the CPACT framework to help faculty think more holistically about course design through content, pedagogy, assessment, community, and transdisciplinarity. I also co-founded The Playground, a human-centered design and innovation lab focused on creativity, experimentation, and interdisciplinary problem-solving.

What remains deeply meaningful to me is that many of these systems continue to evolve and thrive even after my transition to a different institution. Over time, I became increasingly interested in how educational systems could be designed not around individual brilliance alone, but around cultures and structures capable of sustaining meaningful growth collectively.

This systems-oriented thinking continued at San Francisco Bay University, where one of my earliest efforts involved helping shape pedagogical ambitions into a more coherent institutional language through the development of the PERS model: Personalized, Experiential, Relationship-Rich, and Student-Centered learning.

Alongside this institutional work, I have been deeply engaged in exploring how AI can reshape teaching, learning, faculty development, instructional design, and educational systems more broadly. Rather than approaching AI simply as a productivity tool, I have been interested in how human-centered AI frameworks can support reflection, creativity, metacognition, participation, dialogue, and more meaningful learning experiences.

This work has included building AI-supported faculty development ecosystems, designing custom teaching assistants, integrating AI into course design and delivery, developing AI-supported classroom engagement models, and experimenting with new forms of instructional design that move beyond static content-centered approaches. Much of this exploration focuses on how AI can help create learning environments that are more adaptive, interactive, reflective, and responsive to the complexity of human learning.

I have also been interested in how AI intersects with interface design and student experience, particularly in reducing friction inside learning environments, supporting more intentional engagement, and helping students navigate increasingly complex educational systems. Across many of these experiments, I have been particularly interested in how AI can strengthen metacognition by helping learners become more aware of their assumptions, patterns of thinking, decision-making processes, and evolving ways of making meaning.

Increasingly, my work has moved toward imagining and prototyping a new generation of educational products and learning ecosystems built around human-centered AI principles rather than purely automation-driven models. This includes rethinking not only educational technologies themselves, but the deeper assumptions underlying instructional design, assessment, participation, feedback, and the relationship between humans and intelligent systems inside learning environments.

Much of my work ultimately revolves around a simple but difficult question: how can educational systems remain deeply human while also adapting honestly to technological, cultural, and societal change?

Much of my current work revolves around questions that feel both exciting and deeply unsettling for the future of higher education.

I continue to explore trauma-informed teaching, neurodivergence, community cultural wealth, and culturally sustaining practices as essential foundations for creating learning environments that are more humane, participatory, and responsive to the complexity of student experience.

At the same time, I have become increasingly interested in how AI is reshaping some of the most fundamental assumptions underlying education itself. As AI systems become collaborators, co-designers, reflective partners, and increasingly present participants within learning environments, many traditional educational structures begin to feel unstable.

This has led me to questions surrounding the future of assessment, curriculum design, and human learning. What happens when creation itself becomes the starting point of learning rather than the final stage of Bloom’s Taxonomy? What might an inverted or reimagined taxonomy look like in a world where access to information and generation becomes increasingly abundant?

I am also interested in making the hidden curriculum more visible and in treating durable human skills not as secondary outcomes, but as central parts of educational design. Increasingly, I find myself asking how out-of-class learning, experimentation, reflection, collaboration, and lived experience can become more intentionally integrated into formal learning environments.

Another recurring question in my work concerns the isolation of courses from one another. Most curricula continue to function as disconnected silos, largely unaware of what happens outside their own boundaries. AI creates possibilities for designing courses and learning ecosystems that become more interconnected, adaptive, reflective, and aware of one another over time. In such environments, courses themselves may evolve continuously rather than remaining static containers of outdated content.

These questions require a larger reimagining of learning experiences, institutional systems, and the relationship between humans and intelligent technologies. While many aspects of this moment in higher education feel uncertain and even frightening, I also feel fortunate to be working alongside colleagues, educators, designers, and institutions willing to experiment, question assumptions, and imagine alternative futures.

Much of what motivates me each day comes from the belief that higher education still has an opportunity to evolve into something more human, reflective, connected, and meaningful than what currently exists. I feel privileged to participate in that ongoing exploration and hopeful that some of these experiments may help illuminate at least one possible direction forward.