By Dave DeFusco
When Mehluli Nokwara was growing up in Zimbabwe, artificial intelligence felt distant鈥攕omething happening somewhere else, driven by giant technology companies and elite research labs overseas. Today, he is helping shape that future himself.
Nokwara, who is graduating in August from the Katz School鈥檚 M.S. Artificial Intelligence, has built a career that spans healthcare technology, entrepreneurship and AI research across two continents. His work ranges from developing medical monitoring systems in Zimbabwe to researching how AI can become safer and more trustworthy in hospitals.
鈥淚 often felt like I was observing the AI revolution rather than participating in it directly,鈥 said Nokwara. 鈥淐oming to New York placed me closer to the center of where a lot of AI innovation, research and opportunity was happening.鈥
At the Katz School, Nokwara found mentors who pushed him beyond simply learning how AI works. He credits professors like Ramesh Natarajan and Jay Zhou with helping shape how he thinks about technology and problem-solving.
鈥淧rofessor Natarajan pushed me to go further than surface-level understanding,鈥 said Nokwara. 鈥淧rofessor Zhou helped build my intuition for how the industry actually works. That kind of teaching sticks in a way that a textbook cannot replicate.鈥
Zhou said Nokwara stands out not only for his technical talent but also for his determination and vision.
鈥淢ehluli is an exceptionally impressive student,鈥 said Zhou. 鈥淗e combines strong technical ability with entrepreneurial thinking and a deep sense of purpose. What makes him remarkable is that he is not just building technology for the sake of innovation. He is focused on solving real human problems.鈥
That mission became deeply personal for Nokwara because of his experiences growing up around healthcare challenges.
鈥淢y mother was frequently ill, so hospitals and medication were part of everyday life for me,鈥 he said. 鈥淗ealthcare technology never felt abstract. It always felt human.鈥
Today, that perspective drives Nokwara鈥檚 graduate research into one of the biggest concerns surrounding artificial intelligence in medicine: whether AI systems can actually be trusted. His capstone research focuses on 鈥渦ncertainty quantification鈥 in clinical large language models, or AI systems trained to answer medical questions. In simpler terms, he is studying how AI can recognize when it may not know the correct answer.
鈥淎s AI systems become more widely used in healthcare, the cost of mistakes becomes much more serious,鈥 said Nokwara. 鈥淭he challenge is that AI can sometimes sound extremely confident even when it is wrong.鈥
His research uses a powerful open-source AI model called Mistral-7B and evaluates it using MedMCQA, a large medical benchmark dataset filled with clinical reasoning questions.
鈥淚nstead of only asking, 鈥榃hat answer did the AI produce?鈥 I am also asking, 鈥楬ow certain should we be that this answer is reliable?鈥欌 said Nokwara. 鈥淭he goal is to help make clinical AI systems safer, more transparent and more trustworthy.鈥
His research, however, is only one side of Nokwara鈥檚 story. Before moving to the United States, he co-founded Menokws, a healthcare technology company in Zimbabwe that developed affordable connected medical devices and hospital monitoring systems. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the company worked on low-cost ventilator and oxygen-monitoring technology for clinics serving underserved communities.
鈥淲hat made IoT healthcare systems powerful to me was the idea that a single healthcare professional could monitor multiple patients remotely,鈥 said Nokwara. 鈥淚n underserved communities, technology is not always about convenience. Sometimes it is about extending limited human capacity.鈥
Menokws鈥 work was deployed in more than 20 clinics across Zimbabwe and eventually won the country鈥檚 prestigious POTRAZ National Hackathon.
鈥淲inning the competition changed my confidence, but more important, it changed my direction,鈥 Nokwara said. 鈥淚t made me realize that projects built in local environments could still grow into meaningful systems with real-world impact.鈥
As he completes his studies at the Katz School, Nokwara is also running TrendPulse, an AI-powered demand forecasting application integrated directly into the Shopify e-commerce platform. The software helps small businesses predict inventory demand and avoid costly overstocking or shortages.
鈥淢any small businesses are making important decisions using spreadsheets and intuition,鈥 he said. 鈥淭rendPulse tries to answer a more practical question: 鈥榃hat should this business buy next?鈥欌
Ultimately, Nokwara鈥檚 research and startups are about the same thing: how intelligent systems behave under uncertainty, and whether people can trust the output. For him, the work goes beyond building software.
鈥淚 hope my story demonstrates that ambition and impact are not limited by geography or circumstance,鈥 he said. 鈥淪ometimes you just have to start building.鈥
