Safinah Ali

About

Safinah Ali is an Assistant Professor at NYU Steinhardt in the Department of Administration, Leadership, and Technology. She holds a PhD in Media Arts and Sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, along with a Masters degree in Science from MIT, a Masters degree in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University, and a Bachelor's degree in Design from the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati. Her research focuses on using AI tools and agents to support human creativity and learning. She develops child-AI interactions to foster creative learning and creates inclusive AI curricula to empower creators. Safinah has deployed her AI learning resources to teachers worldwide and engaged in extensive student outreach, developing teaching resources, interactive tools, and assessments to make AI concepts accessible and study their influence on student learning. She also develops social robotic agents to provide creativity scaffolding and social-emotional support to children, personalizing interactions for students with diverse needs. Her long-term research demonstrates how these interventions enhance verbal, figural, and constructional creativity among children. Her work has been published in numerous academic journals and peer-reviewed conferences, and she has received awards including the Teaching Excellence Award 2024, the Microsoft Research fellowship (2022-2024), and MIT’s Teaching Development fellowship.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Medicine
• Psychology
• Demography
• Gerontology
• Social Science
• Environmental health
• Psychiatry
• Developmental psychology

Selected publications

• Trends and Predictors of COVID-19 Information Sources and Their Relationship With Knowledge and Beliefs Related to the Pandemic: Nationwide Cross-Sectional Study

  JMIR Public Health and Surveillance · 2020 · 268 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  BACKGROUND: During the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a heightened need to understand health information seeking behaviors to address disparities in knowledge and beliefs about the crisis. OBJECTIVE: This study assessed sociodemographic predictors of the use and trust of different COVID-19 information sources, as well as the association between information sources and knowledge and beliefs about the pandemic. METHODS: An online survey was conducted among US adults in two rounds during March and Apr…

  DOI

• Social media as a recruitment platform for a nationwide online survey of COVID-19 knowledge, beliefs, and practices in the United States: methodology and feasibility analysis

  BMC Medical Research Methodology · 2020 · 257 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic has evolved into one of the most impactful health crises in modern history, compelling researchers to explore innovative ways to efficiently collect public health data in a timely manner. Social media platforms have been explored as a research recruitment tool in other settings; however, their feasibility for collecting representative survey data during infectious disease epidemics remain unexplored. OBJECTIVES: This study has two aims 1) describe the methodolog…

  DOI

• Increased alcohol use during the COVID-19 pandemic: The effect of mental health and age in a cross-sectional sample of social media users in the U.S.

  Preventive Medicine · 2021 · 200 citations

  DOI

• Changes in grocery shopping behaviour among low-income households during the COVID-19 pandemic

  Public Health Nutrition · 2025-01-01 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access

  OBJECTIVE: The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) Online Purchasing Pilot (OPP) authorised the use of SNAP benefits online in Maryland in May 2020. We assessed shopping behaviour and intentions associated with uptake and intended future use of online grocery shopping during and after COVID-19 among SNAP-eligible households. DESIGN: In this mixed-methods study, participants completed a survey on online grocery shopping, and a purposefully sampled subset participated in focus groups…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Diabetes distress among immigrants of south Asian descent living in New York City: baseline results from the DREAM randomized control trial

  BMC Public Health · 2025-02-02 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  BACKGROUND: Type 2 diabetes (T2D) disproportionately affects individuals of South Asian descent. Additionally, diabetes distress (DD) may lead to complications with diabetes management. This study examines the prevalence of DD among foreign-born individuals of South Asian descent in New York City (NYC) and its association with sociodemographic and clinical factors. METHODS: Baseline data was collected from the Diabetes Research, Education, and Action for Minorities (DREAM) Initiative, an interve…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Ralph J. DiClemente

  New York University

  34 shared

• Nadia Islam

  Mayo Clinic in Arizona

  24 shared

• Angela Trude

  New York University

  22 shared

• Joshua Foreman

  Centre for Eye Research Australia

  21 shared

• Yuxuan Gu

  18 shared

• W.H. Wilson Tang

  Gates (United States)

  18 shared

• Caitlin M. Lowery

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  18 shared

• Ariadna Capasso

  Health Resources in Action

  18 shared

Education

• PhD, School of Global Public Health

  New York University

• Bachelor of Arts (Public Health, Political Science)

  Johns Hopkins University

  2019

• Coursework

  University of Queensland

  2016

Awards & honors

• Teaching Excellence Award 2024
• Microsoft Research fellowship (2022-2024)
• MIT’s Teaching Development fellowship

Similar researchers at New York University

• J. Lawrence Aberh-63
• Sudha Arunachalamh-22
• Elaine Beckerh-11