Mustafa is a Research Scientist of ePAT Technologies, and Research Fellow of Curtin University, WA. He is one of the inventors of PainChek, who received a number of state and national awards such as Innovator of the Year, Incite Awards, and iAwards.

His research was supported by Alzheimer's Australia through grant funding and PhD scholarship; and CSIRO through the inclusion of his project in their Accelerator Program 'ON'. He was one out of 9 Australians who one Creative Innovation Global Scholarship in 2016. He was also the Gold Disruptor ICT Research of the Year at the ACS Digital Disruptor Awards.