An Age of Empowerment: Neha Kumar

Posted May 14, 2019

Neha Kumar remembers her first semester at Georgia Tech as some of the best months of her life. “Everything was crazy,” she said. “In the midst of all that craziness, the one thing that felt predictable was the class I was teaching.”

The new assistant professor was then teaching Technology and Poverty, a course she developed and now teaches every fall. “Every time I was in class, I felt like I was home. It was really anchoring for me.” That semester, she received perfect evaluations from her students. To her, it was validation that she was translating her passion for the subject matter to her students.

Kumar’s work looks at mobile technologies and how they are designed for and adopted in underserved communities around the world, specifically in India and diverse rural contexts. Her focus is on formal and informal learning applications that target sustainable development goals. She approaches the work with an emphasis on entertainment-driven adoption, and how it can motivate people to use new technologies. One of her research projects, which she presented at SXSW EDU this year, investigated the potential of smartphone-based virtual reality for learning environments from Cobb County in Atlanta to slum communities in Mumbai, India.

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This is the eighth installment of a yearlong series about women at Georgia Tech. See the full series.