Abubakr Muhammad is a systems engineer whose teaching and research explore the interaction of technology, water and society.

He is a tenured Professor of Electrical Engineering at LUMS and the founding director of its Centre for Water Informatics & Technology (WIT). He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, USA, where his doctoral work received an institute-wide Best Ph.D. Dissertation Award. Following postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania and McGill University, he joined LUMS in 2008. His research group works across agricultural robotics, human–water systems, and climate analytics. He has held visiting positions at the University of Oxford, ICTP, and KAUST, and has served on advisory panels to government agencies and industry on the use of emerging digital technologies to address challenges in climate change, disaster management, water management, and food security.

A recurring feature of his work is the integration of robotics and AI, systems thinking, and socio-hydrological case studies to address questions at the interface of technology and public policy. He is broadly interested in how rigorous systems analysis can help design water institutions and allocation mechanisms that are not only efficient and resilient, but also demonstrably just. A related interest is how contemporary mathematical frameworks and computational models can be informed by the historical, institutional, and intellectual traditions of the societies in which these systems operate.

Beyond science and engineering, his intellectual interests draw on contemporary and classical scholarship at the intersection of environmental history, philosophy of technology, political economy, and Islamic intellectual history.