A car accident changed this engineer’s career trajectory — and mission 

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Ather Sharif, a software engineer who recently earned his PhD, dedicates his career to bridging the gap between academia and industry practices in digital accessibility. 

“I think if you’re ever going to make a real impact, these two things need to be one,” Sharif told Technical.ly. “They can’t just operate in their parallel worlds. I don’t think it’s going to be sustainable.”

The former Comcast lead software engineer now works as a principal associate at McLean, Virginia-headquartered financial services giant Capital One. Sharif focused his computer science dissertation, which he wrapped in 2024 at the University of Washington, on improving accessibility to data visualizations online. He’s also the founder of EvoXLabs, an accessibility-focused research and consulting organization. He’s received multiple honors for this work, including an award for his site evaluating Philadelphia’s public transit accessibility, acceptance into the ADA 25 Advancing Leadership Fellows program and leading the 2015 Disability Pride Walk in Philly.  

This passion for accessibility comes from a personal place. In March 2013, less than two years after he immigrated to the US from Pakistan, he survived a car accident that left him with quadriplegia. Needing to stay in the country under the parameters of an F-1 visa forced Sharif to quickly return and continue his master’s degree at the University of North Dakota in 2014. He eventually finished that degree at St. Joseph’s University.

“I didn’t really have my family here with me,” he said. “I didn’t have a choice. So for a year, it was just like, work hard, work hard, every day. If you don’t do it, then I don’t know where you’ll be.” 

Sharif spoke with Technical.ly about this journey, working in academia and the corporate world, advice for people navigating visas and green cards, and what he likes to do outside of work. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. 

What was the beginning of your tech journey? When did you become interested in tech? 

I think I’ve always been interested in it, but that wasn’t necessarily my field of choice. When I went to college for my undergrad, I went for a mechanical engineering program. Then, for some reason, I just was really bad at physics. 

The only thing that was really standing out in my grades then was computer science stuff, just because I’d been doing computer science things. I would build websites. … and I just thought it was a hobby rather than a career. 

I don’t think computer science, computer engineering or software engineering was a stable job at that point in time. But regardless of all that, that’s the only place I’m getting good grades and feels really natural to me. 

After my freshman year, I switched over to the software engineering program, and since then, I’ve never looked back. 

Although there’s an interesting thing to this story, that when I got injured — there was a car accident [in college], and so I lost a lot of functionality for my hands and stuff. At that point, it was like, am I going to be able to type as fast as anyone else? Or just do the basic things that are stereotypically required for you to do as a computer scientist?

You can call this internalized ableism, but I was like, “No, I can’t do this. I have to switch to something else.” But then I was like, “Well, maybe I could try.” 

And so I worked with … the occupational therapist and the physical therapist to learn how to type. Then I came back into the field. So there was a time when I moved away from the field and thought that’s not going to be for me. But then I came back to it, and since then, it’s just been go, go, go. 

Why did you pursue a Ph.D.? 

I was doing a lot of accessibility work in Philly, and I was doing it through my organization that’s called the EvoXLabs. One thing that I was recognizing was there was a really large gap between academia and industry. So whatever industry was doing, academia was not aware, or so it seemed to me. And whatever was happening in academia in terms of research was something that the industry was just not aware of. 

I saw that disconnect, and I thought that the only way I could really bridge that disconnect was to be working full-time — not a decision that I would ever repeat again in my life, but that was the intention.

Why wouldn’t you make that decision again?

I think it’s pretty safe to say that I didn’t really have a life then — that’s just, work for Comcast, and switch, and then the research. Weekends were all gone. It was really hard to spend time on anything really. 

How has being an immigrant impacted your tech career? 

I came here in December 2011. I haven’t been back since I came here on the F-1 visa. 

One of the reasons why I had to really rush back after my injury to get back to school was because of the visa status. So if I didn’t have that restriction, I don’t know if I’d go back to school. It worked out really well, but I don’t know if I would and if I could, I don’t know if it would have been that sooner. 

For an injury like this, you need a lot of time to recover … I wouldn’t have done that. There’s the injury aspect of it, but then there was also an immigration aspect of it — which really pushed me to do it because otherwise, I would have been sent back home. 

I think the political aspect of things, regarding immigration and stuff — besides just the emotional toll that it takes and things like that happen — there are a lot of tangible impacts from the immigration policies, right? 

I think the biggest one that I can also talk about is that when people get here on any kind of immigration status and they pursue, particularly, a Ph.D. program, it’s crucial that they are going to do research. And for research, you need grants, but not being an American citizen or a permanent resident, you actually don’t have access to the [government] scholarships and grants at all. 

Are you going to a school that has a lot of money in terms of funding? Does your advisor have grants that they can give you? But you can’t have those fellowships, the NSF grants. 

I got my green card while I was in the Ph.D. program, and I think it was a drastic switch. For three years of my program, I couldn’t access anything. And then [in] the last two I can now get access to. There was a night and day difference. 

What advice would you give to someone navigating visas and green cards? 

It’s never too late to understand the process. It’s never too late to sit down with an immigration attorney and get to know what your choices are. 

I didn’t plan it that way. I just kind of was like, “I’ll just roll with whatever comes next, and we’ll see what happens.” 

The more you get to know what you’re about to face [earlier on, though], you can prepare yourself better. And maybe that will impact the career choices or the organizational choices. 

What are your career and personal goals?

It’s a good question — not the best question to ask someone who just graduated [laughs].

I just started at Capital One in November. For the foreseeable future, I think that’s probably where I’ll be for a little bit. … Do I want to go to academia? Do I want to go into industry? I still have to figure it out. 

One of the reasons why I came to the Virginia area [was] to just slow down, because the grad school and all-time working was just really fast-paced. … Now I have a little bit more time

to work on things I really want to. I have a book deal with Springer, it’s exciting. 

It’s largely on the same topic as my dissertation. But it’s not just my dissertation: It’s a book that captures a lot of other research work that has been done in the area, and it’s just geared towards people who are interested in learning about it a lot more. 

Do you have any hobbies or interests outside of work?

I try to avoid that question quite a bit. As a kid, I used to play Scrabble and participate in a lot of competitions and stuff, and I quit for like 15 years, and I picked it back up last year. … I’m playing at a competitive level now.

What else is on your mind? 

There are policies for people with disabilities, there are policies for immigration. There’s no crossover, and I think that’s a really, really terrible place to be in. You would either fall into one or the other, and that intersectionality of things is obviously really important. 

The intersection of these two fields is just something that people have to suffer through. It’s important for a lot of people — it’s important for people who would know someone else going through these things, to know that it is going to be a very tough area to help them support better. But it also helps policymakers understand that there’s a place here that needs to be addressed well, more than it has been historically. 

We have an ADA, sure, that’s great. Love that. Then you have immigration statuses. Don’t love that too much, but you still have it. Then there’s a crossover between the two, and that’s worse than both of them. 

When I got injured, that was a significant injury. Spinal cord injuries are significant injuries, and they require quite a bit of time, not just the time that you spend in the hospital, but time to get back to life and to change your mindset, adapting to things, being independent … and that’s not going to happen in one year, right? That’s going to take a lot of time. 

You need that time to recover. You need that time to build up your confidence, your viewpoint of the world, stuff like that. And if you’re going to get restricted by visa status, you’re not going to pay attention to those things. You’re going to pay attention to, “Okay, what can I do to stay in this country?” Because if I go back to my country, I’m not really confident if I’d be able to get that level of care, if I’d be able to be involved in a society as much as I can be involved in Western society here, things like that. 

I went through what I went through, but I’m good for it, better for it. But I just hope that we can do better for other people who might face [that].

This story, and all of Technical.ly's immigration reporting, is made possible by the WES Mariam Assefa Fund.

The WES Mariam Assefa Fund supports catalytic efforts to create more inclusive economies for immigrants and refugees in the US and Canada. It works closely with organizations and leaders focused on ensuring more equitable access to opportunity and wealth.