Musab Popatia is a “Tartan on the Rise”
Carnegie Mellon University’s “Tartans on the Rise” celebrates recent alumni who are making an impact in their communities through leadership, innovation and career achievements. CMU has more than 110,000 alumni worldwide. Qatar campus graduate, Musab Popatia, was named on the 2024 Tartans on the Rise list.
Published by Carnegie Mellon University’s Engage With CMU as “Musab Popatia, Co-founder and Head of Engineering, Stellic: Simplifying Paths to College Degrees.“
By Elizabeth Speed
For Musab Popatia (CMU 2016) navigating the university degree mapping process is so unnecessarily complex that it’s a perfect opportunity to apply advanced computer science skills to make a difference.
He tackles problems facing college students through Stellic, a company he co-founded with fellow Tartans on the Rise and Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar alumni Sabih Bin Wasi and Rukhsar Neyaz.
“Stellic’s degree management tools help students do well in college, and that has a multiplier effect,” he says. “If you educate a particular student, it also affects their families and communities. Supporting academic journeys is a massive opportunity, and it’s also a space that’s fairly untapped with room to grow, potentially affecting 50 million students worldwide.”
Musab is the head of engineering, working on the details of integrating data from disparate institutional systems including student information systems, course catalogs and learning management systems. Once it’s all gathered in the Stellic interface, it takes the manual work out of building a degree plan for every possible major. Students and university faculty and staff get a visual interface to track progress, ensure all requirements are noted and understand the implications of decisions such as changing or adding a major.
Stellic is used at 70 colleges and universities globally.
Musab’s team builds the tools for students to plan their degrees and locate relevant classes and ways for advisers to monitor and communicate academic progress. He also helps administrators leverage data to identify trends in course demand, instructor load, department effectiveness and projected graduation bottlenecks.
He’s proud to manage a very young team including a number of recent college graduates, who draw on their own experiences to improve the Stellic interface. They’re working on an extension for prospective students to see detailed information about their future at college.
“We’re providing information that typically would only be visible after you have been admitted,” he says. “We can help them make a more informed choice and pick the school that’s best for them.”