Hira Javed is a PhD Candidate who created a personal academic website that shares her experience, skills, and thoughtful visual design. We talk about building her website, the 3 questions that introduce her research, and her thoughts for grad students thinking about creating their own space online. You deserve an online presence if it’s something you want for yourself as an academic.
The 2026 Best Personal Academic Websites Contest opens on June 11, 2026! A new blog post will be published with the announcement for you. I hope you’ll consider entering yourself. Please share the contest with a friend whose website you admire. I appreciate you!
Find more interviews in our series featuring winners from the 2025 contest.
A full transcript of this episode will be added to this blog post when it’s been fully reviewed by a human. Thank you!
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Bio
Hira Javed is a PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto, Canada. Her research focuses on how civic service designers navigate the complex public sector landscape and develop relationships across multiple communities of practice. Her journey into design began not just as a creative pursuit, but as a method for understanding and reshaping complex social systems. This perspective has guided her design practice and academic research. In the past 15 years she has worked in a variety of design and strategy roles, helping organizations learn new ways of thinking and doing things to create human-centric experiences. She also developed the curriculum for a required undergraduate design course at the University of Waterloo, Canada and taught it for 6 years.
