Joshua Ansah

Joshua Owusu Ansah is a PhD student in Engineering Education Systems and Design, with a concentration in Machine Learning, at Arizona State University's Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering, where he also serves as a Graduate Research Associate at The Polytechnic School. His research sits at the intersection of artificial intelligence, engineering education research infrastructure, and inclusive technology design.

Joshua's current research examines the accuracy and reliability of AI-powered metadata extraction for engineering education research. As the volume of published scholarship grows, libraries and researchers increasingly depend on automated tools to curate bibliographic metadata, yet errors such as hallucinated fields and misattributed authorship threaten data integrity. His work benchmarks automated extraction approaches against human-verified metadata across peer-reviewed engineering education publications, identifying where these tools succeed, where they fail, and how combined approaches can outperform any single tool. He plans to expand this line of research into scalable, trustworthy AI-supported curation workflows for the research community.

Alongside this work, Joshua has supported a National Science Foundation–funded project, studying the factors that shape adaptability among early-career engineers. He is also an author and co-author on a multi-institutional, peer-reviewed study on preparing the next generation of AI engineers, conducted with collaborators across Virginia Tech, the University of Georgia, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Florida, and he presented research at the American Society for Engineering Education and CONVERGE conference. His earlier research includes work on large language model–driven conversational interfaces for blind and visually impaired users.

Joshua completed his Master of Science in Information Technology at ASU in 2024 with a 4.0 GPA as a Mastercard Foundation Scholar, and holds a BSc in Computer Science from Ashesi University in Ghana, where he also worked as a software engineer at Chalkboard Education building digital learning systems. Before graduate school, he founded and ran a coding bootcamp in his community in Ghana, supported by the Clinton Global Initiative and the Ford Foundation, introducing young people to programming and careers in technology. At Ashesi, he served as a career peer advisor, mathematics tutor, and Mastercard Foundation Scholars representative.

Joshua's long-term goal is to advance how engineers are educated and how AI systems are designed so that both serve people of all backgrounds and abilities.