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I am a postdoctoral research fellow in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. I am currently working with Prof. Soo Young Rieh on a project that seeks to support creativity during searching.

My research interests lie broadly in the area of Information Retrieval (IR), particularly, focusing on exploratory search, such as tasks that require learning and generating new ideas, struggling search for users that have low digital literacy, and all aspects of retrieval for low resourced languages. I combine human and computational perspectives to study search systems, including understanding interaction behaviour of users in specific contexts; and developing computational techniques to enhance searching experience for users in those contexts.

I have a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa, where I worked under the supervision of Prof. Hussein Suleman in the Digital Libraries Lab. My doctoral research examined the use of language similarities to improve retrieval for resource-scarce languages.

I obtained my MSc in Computer Science from the University of Essex, United Kingdom and BSc from the University of Malawi. Before starting my doctoral studies, I worked as a lecturer at Mzuzu University in Malawi.