Meet the Member: Dr Homa Molavi from Mathematician to Multidisciplinary Marvel

I’m genuinely enthusiastic about AI, I encourage companies, governments, and institutions to embrace it, because I believe traditional ways of running organisations are often too slow and too inefficient for the challenges we face today. But here’s the irony: in the course of that advocacy, I started noticing something troubling. Many organisations were exaggerating their AI adoption, not because the technology was working well, but because being seen to use AI had become fashionable, even expected. That’s what we call “AI washing” and “AI hype.” So I’ve ended up dedicating a significant part of my research mission to solving a problem that my own enthusiasm helped me spot. It’s a strange but very real tension.

As Dr Molavi herself explains, from the age of seven she wanted to run her own business, and run it well: “That early ambition made me curious about how organisations work, how decisions get made, and what makes some businesses succeed while others fail. That curiosity never left me, it just became more sophisticated over time.” Since then, her journey as been anything but linear:

I began by studying mathematics, which gave me a very objective, structured way of seeing the world. After my diploma, I shifted into policymaking, studying social sciences and public management. I still remember how difficult that transition was, social problems demand a much more subjective mindset, and I had to consciously unlearn some of my mathematical rigidity to engage with them properly. Then came my Master’s, which brought things back together, a combination of mathematics, policy, programming, and coding. My PhD took me somewhere I hadn’t expected: engineering management. It was a world quite different from business studies, but it gave me tools I couldn’t have found anywhere else. And now I’ve come full circle, back into the business school environment.

Undertaking my PhD at the University of Manchester, within a leading School of Management, uniquely positioned me to tackle complex organisational challenges through interdisciplinary research spanning leadership, governance, sustainability, risk, and advanced data analytics. But beyond the training, I was always drawn to problems that don’t fit neatly into one box. Management and engineering can feel too siloed on their own. But when you combine them or when you bring AI and machine learning into organisational and social questions you start seeing patterns that no single field could reveal alone. That boundary between the quantitative and the social is where I feel most intellectually alive.

This meandering journey across disciplines and institutions has equipped Dr Molavi with a comprehensive and complex understanding of how systems and ideas interact. Dr Molavi elaborates that if she wasn’t working in academia she would still be in a role like business consulting or policy advising – the passion for helping governments, organisations or international bodies to tackle the practical and governance challenges of AI adoption transcends any job role. And as Dr Molavi highlights, “research gives me the intellectual freedom to develop ideas rigorously and with proper evidence. But the pull toward real-world impact is always strong. In many ways, the two aren’t that different, the best research is, in the end, a form of very thorough consulting.”

So, what is she doing with that today?

So today I work across data analytics, AI-driven methods, organisational behaviour, policymaking, and sustainability. What ties all of these threads together is one core question: how can we use computational tools to understand complex human and organisational systems, and then translate those insights into better decisions and better policy? My current research agenda focuses specifically on diagnosing organisational risks in AI adoption before they escalate into reputational, economic, or social crises, examining challenges like AI washing, AI hype, technical debt, hidden AI costs, governance failures, and data quality risks. I’m trying to build frameworks that balance innovation with organisational intelligence, sustainability, and safety.

This links to another important consideration, given that Dr Molavi works across so many disciplines, how does she create and maintain a coherent identity?

My answer: the coherence comes from the question, not the field. Every project I work on is asking some version of the same thing, how do governments, people, organisations, and institutions make decisions under uncertainty or constraint, and what can we learn from data to help them do it better? The disciplinary context shifts. The underlying curiosity never does.

Dr Molavi is currently collaborating with colleagues across the globe; in the Middle East, Spain, Finland, the Netherlands and the United States. These collaborators work not just in business but in engineering and health. Dr Molavi comments “These collaborations have been some of the most intellectually stretching experiences of my career, being forced to speak across disciplinary languages sharpens your thinking in ways that working within a single field simply doesn’t.” This work has received significant attention and recognition, most recently from the British Academy who recognised her for her exceptional talent

That recognition came with a sense of genuine responsibility. As a Global Talent awardee, I felt and still feel that I have an obligation to create real impact: for companies, for British citizens, and beyond. It crystallised my commitment to building my long-term career in the UK through high-impact research, industry and public-sector partnerships, knowledge transfer to SMEs lacking in-house AI capabilities, and mentoring the next generation of ethically and digitally fluent leaders.

And what about her experience of NUSC?

NUSC, with its genuinely multi-disciplinary approach to complex systems and urban challenges, felt like a natural home for that evolution. It’s rare to find a centre where the breadth of my interests, spanning AI, policy, sustainability, and organisational behaviour can all find a legitimate place at the table. Within NUSC, my work contributes to the Centre’s mission of discovering and applying knowledge to help communities connect and prosper. My particular contribution sits at the intersection of AI-driven analysis and policy using machine learning and natural language processing to uncover hidden behavioural patterns in organisations and urban communities. The Centre’s commitment to multi-disciplinary urban research is exactly the kind of environment where this work can move beyond the journal article and into genuine practice.

We asked Dr Molavi which urban challenge or opportunity excites her most right now, this was her response:

The intersection of AI governance and urban sustainability. Cities are generating vast amounts of data, and AI is increasingly being deployed to manage everything from water infrastructure to public health systems. But the governance frameworks that determine how that AI is used, who benefits, who is excluded, who is held accountable are lagging dangerously behind the technology itself. That gap is both a serious risk and an enormous research opportunity, and it’s one I think about constantly.

Finally, we asked Dr Molavi to share with us something that recently inspired her thinking:

Recently, I came across a video showing people using virtual reality and losing themselves in it, in some cases, physically harming themselves or those around them. As immersive technologies form part of my research interests, it was deeply concerning. The number of VR companies is growing rapidly, and the virtual environment is almost by design unlimited. But the reality of how many of us live, in small urban homes, in dense cities, made me think seriously about whether we need to regulate not just how VR is used, but where. It’s the kind of question that sounds niche until you realise it sits at the heart of urban design, public safety, and digital governance all at once.

Dr Homa Molavi is currently inviting applications from highly motivated candidates for PhD study in the interdisciplinary field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) adoption and its impact across business and public sector environments. Could this be you? Contact her today.

The cover image on this post was generated using WordPress built in AI function. No AI was used in the writing or reviewing of this blog post.