Laura Hosman

Laura Hosman is Associate Professor at Arizona State University, where she holds a joint appointment in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and The Polytechnic School. She is also a Charter Professor (2025–2028), a title conferred on two ASU faculty each year in recognition of exceptional contributions that advance the university’s charter of access, inclusion, excellence, and societal impact.

Dr. Hosman’s work sits at the intersection of technology, education, and development, with a particular focus on building digital and information literacy in communities that are not yet meaningfully connected to the internet. She is co-founder and co-director of SolarSPELL (Solar Powered Educational Learning Library), an offline, solar-powered digital library and information literacy initiative that equips disconnected communities with localized educational content. The SolarSPELL initiative combines rugged, ultra-portable, solar-powered technology with curated, open-access digital libraries and a proven train-the-trainer implementation model. Since its founding, SolarSPELL has implemented more than 700 digital libraries across 15 countries, impacting education, health, agriculture, and livelihoods through locally adapted content and capacity-building.

Dr. Hosman’s action-oriented, in-the-field research approach is grounded in human-centered design, community partnerships, and iterative prototyping. Her scholarship addresses persistent gaps in ICT4D (Information and Communication Technology for Development), especially the tendency of global development initiatives to prioritize infrastructure over skill-building. Her work has appeared in leading peer-reviewed journals including Information Technology for Development, Journal of Global Health Reports, Sustainability, First Monday, and Journal of Political Science Education, among others. Her most recent research explores how to measure the social impact of digital libraries in communities where libraries have never previously existed, using mixed-methods approaches co-developed with ASU graduate students.

Dr. Hosman has engaged more than 1,000 students in SolarSPELL’s work since the initiative began, with approximately 150–200 ASU students participating each year through internships, project-based courses, fieldwork, and content curation activities. She has designed and taught cross-disciplinary, experiential courses that span engineering, global development, education, and public policy, emphasizing ethical problem-solving, user-centered design, and global competence. She has led SolarSPELL implementation trainings in over a dozen countries, bringing students into the field and organizing collaborative workshops with ministries of education, local nonprofits, and international agencies including Peace Corps and UNHCR.

Her work has received national and international recognition. In 2025 alone, SolarSPELL was named one of TIME’s Best Inventions, awarded “Best in Show” at South by Southwest (SXSW) Innovation Awards, and selected for the HundrED Global Collection of the world’s top educational innovations. At ASU, she received the President’s Award for Principled Innovation, and her initiative was recognized for its leadership in embedding values-based, community-centered approaches into global education efforts.

Prior to joining ASU in 2016, Dr. Hosman held academic appointments at California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly), Illinois Institute of Technology, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Southern California. Her international fieldwork has taken her to over 20 countries, including South Sudan, Lesotho, Rwanda, Comoros, Samoa, Papua New Guinea, and Fiji, where she has implemented technology projects, conducted impact evaluations, and built collaborative learning partnerships. Her work has been supported by funders including USAID, Google, the Arizona Community Foundation, the IEEE, and the S. Rex & Joan T. Lewis Foundation.

Driven by the conviction that information literacy is foundational to empowerment, Dr. Hosman continues to push the boundaries of what innovation looks like in real-world development contexts—ensuring that technology serves people, and not the other way around.