Zahra Abba Omar

Zahra Abba Omar https://zahraao.com Zahra Abba Omar Thu, 26 Aug 2021 11:36:43 +0000 https://zahraao.com en Information https://zahraao.com/Information Tue, 30 Mar 2021 12:46:59 +0000 Zahra Abba Omar https://zahraao.com/Information b. Johannesburg, South AfricaBased between New Haven, USA and Johannesburg, South Africa Zahra Abba Omar is a researcher and writer. She is presently a PhD candidate in Sociology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) at Yale University. For 2026, she will be part of the Yale ISPS Graduate Policy Fellows Program. At Yale, she also co-convenes the reading group Gender Work, which is supported by the Whitney Humanities Center, and Yale’s Ethnography Hub. She received her BA Honours in Sociology, with distinction, at the University of Cape Town in 2020, where she was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow. Prior to her graduate study, she served as the inaugural Tech Rights Fellow at ALT Advisory, assisting with research and analysis. The Johannesburg-based public interest advisory and law firm works at the intersection of technology and justice. Previously, she served as a research assistant for the Accelerating Achievement for Africa’s Adolescents (Accelerate) Hub, co-located at the University of Cape Town and the University of Oxford, which sought to map paths for accelerators in the implementation of the United Nations’s 2030 development agenda. <img width="2048" height="1536" width_o="2048" height_o="1536" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/fc958a88ee064dbd2408cbc120841be80dcfa072d03f4121c4863bf3345386dd/Research----website-photo.jpeg" data-mid="103815730" border="0" data-scale="90" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/fc958a88ee064dbd2408cbc120841be80dcfa072d03f4121c4863bf3345386dd/Research----website-photo.jpeg" /> School assembly, 2005 (by my mum) Research https://zahraao.com/Research Tue, 30 Mar 2021 12:46:58 +0000 Zahra Abba Omar https://zahraao.com/Research Education PhD in Sociology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Yale University (2022-present) BA Honours in Sociology, University of Cape Town (2020) Bachelor of Social Sciences in Sociology, Politics, and French Language and Literature, University of Cape Town (2017-2019) Research InterestsGender & Sexuality Studies, Medical Sociology, Science & Technology Studies, and Socio-Legal Studies Selected Grants and Awards Yale Institution for Social and Policy Studies Graduate Policy Fellow (2026) Yale Women Faculty Forum Seed Grant (2025) Max Price and Deborah Posel Honours Scholarship, University of Cape Town (2020) National Research Foundation Honours Innovation Scholarship (2020) Honours Merit Scholarship, University of Cape Town (2020) Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, University of Cape Town (2019-2020) Publications https://zahraao.com/Publications Tue, 30 Mar 2021 12:46:59 +0000 Zahra Abba Omar https://zahraao.com/Publications Selected Publications Academic:Peer-reviewed journal articlesRene Almeling & Zahra Abba Omar. 2025. Will Sex and Reproduction Remain Separable in the United States? It’s a Matter of Life and Death. Sex & Sexualities, 0(0). Accessible here. Peer-reviewed conference proceeding papersMenon, Alka V., Zahra Abba Omar, Nadia Nahar, Xenophon Papademetris, Lynn E Fiellin, and Christian Kästner. “Lessons from Clinical Communications for Explainable AI.” 2024. In the 2024 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES), October 21-23, 2024, San Jose, USA. Accessible here. Nahar, Nadia, Jenny Rowlett, Matthew Bray, Zahra Abba Omar, Xenophon Papademetris, Alka Menon, and Christian Kästner. “Regulating Explainability in Machine Learning Applications—Observations from a Policy Design Experiment.” 2024. In the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT ’24), June 3–6, 2024, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Accessible here. Under review “Policy alone is probably not the solution: A large-scale experiment on how novice developers struggle to design meaningful end-user explanations.” Nadia Nahar*, Zahra Abba Omar*, Jacob Tjaden, Inès M. Gilles, Fikir Mekonnen, Jane Hsieh, Erica Okeh, Christian Kästner, and Alka Menon. Pre-print accessible here. (Revise & resubmit) “Tracking Trimesters: Expectant and Current Parents’ Responses to Targeted Online Content in an Era of Digital Consumption.” Zahra Abba Omar. (Revise & resubmit) * Both authors contributed equally to this paper. Policy: “Disinformation through a child’s rights lens” for Media Monitoring Africa, October 2022. Accessible here. Co-authored with Christy Chitengu and Tina Power.“AI Governance in Africa” for ALT Advisory, September 2022. Accessible here. Co-authored with Tara Davis, Murray Hunter, and Wendy Trott.“Gender Analysis of the Digital Transformation in South Africa” for the European Delegation to South Africa, May 2022. Accessible here. Co-authored with Thera van Osch, Tina Power, Rose Gawaya, and Jennifer Smout. Opinion: “Making U=U Work for Adolescents Living with HIV: Making Options, Choices, and Opportunities Available for All” for DSBS Fieldnotes, 2019. Co-authored with Dr Elona Toska. Accessible here. Contact https://zahraao.com/Contact Thu, 26 Aug 2021 11:36:43 +0000 Zahra Abba Omar https://zahraao.com/Contact Full CV available upon request. ︎ ABBZAH003@myuct.ac.za︎ @zabbaomar Homepage https://zahraao.com/Homepage Tue, 30 Mar 2021 12:46:59 +0000 Zahra Abba Omar https://zahraao.com/Homepage PhD Candidate in Sociology and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University.Using qualitative research methods, namely interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, I study FemTech companies and the decisions teams make about platform design. My peer-reviewed work has been published in Sex & Sexualities and Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT). Connect with me on LinkedIn here and contact me here. <img width="1200" height="1600" width_o="1200" height_o="1600" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2ad23719e91e721ac4e337e58c2efbc5fe2b0bf8c968736dc79c49e4b2744612/3c73a481-bc58-476c-9752-dfdcb893c6af.jpeg" data-mid="235930267" border="0" data-scale="79" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2ad23719e91e721ac4e337e58c2efbc5fe2b0bf8c968736dc79c49e4b2744612/3c73a481-bc58-476c-9752-dfdcb893c6af.jpeg" />