Alumni Success Stories

Alumni of the Month

May 2020

Farhad Mohammad Afzali

Farhad Mohammad Afzali earned a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science (BCS) from Kardan University in 2010. During his study period at Kardan University, he secured a GPA of 3.97 and was named the Gold Medallion of BCS Term-A batch.

Mr. Afzali was awarded the prestigious Fulbright Scholarship to complete his Masters of Science in Management Information Systems at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO). He is currently in the final year of his doctoral program and is part of the instructional team teaching Java programming, database management, and statistics courses.

Mr. Afzali’s research interests include human-computer interaction, digital distraction, and smartphone usage. He has done extensive research on cellphone usage in academia and the role of mobile phone penetration and health index in human development. Mr. Afzali has presented his research papers at professional meetings and conferences such as Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2018 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, and America’s Conference on Information Systems.

He has worked with the International Rescue Committee as a Database Officer before he joined the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) in 2008. While at UNAMA, he was deployed to the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) for a three-month project. He is currently the president of the Bioinformatics and Information Technology graduate students group at UNO.

Mr. Afzali has received many honors and awards, including the 2nd place at Big Idea Pitch Contest in 2015, the best presentation in the 9th Annual Computer Science Workshop in 2019 at UNO, and 40 Under 40 Award at Kardan University in 2018.