Mustafa is a Research & Practice Lead at The Dementia Centre, HammondCare. He is a PhD Candidate at School of Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences, Curtin University. His PhD project entitled ‘Improving Pain Management amongst Patients with Dementia’.

Mustafa is a clinical and academic pharmacist formerly served as a Research Fellow at School of Pharmacy and Biomedical Sciences, Curtin University, and served as a Senior Research Scientist of PainChek Ltd. Mustafa is one of the co-founders of PainChek® , an AI-powered pain assessment tool using automated facial recognition and analysis, and clinical pain behaviours (such as vocalisations, and movements) to evaluate the presence and intensity of pain in non-verbal adults, such as those with cognitive impairment or dementia. The tool is registered as a medical device with TGA in Australia and CE mark in Europe and has currently received $5M to conduct a national trial of PainChek® for Australians with dementia living in residential aged care facilities. His work has been recognised in a number of state and national innovation, research, and technology awards in Australia such as the Innovator of the Year, Incite Awards, iAwards, AMY (Digital + Technology Collective) Awards and WA Premier’s Science Awards.

Over his career Mustafa has received peer reviewed and industry grants in excess of $7M. His research was supported by Dementia Australia through grant funding and PhD scholarship; and CSIRO through the inclusion of his project in their Accelerator Program 'ON'. In 2016, he was one out of 9 Australians who won the Creative Innovation Global Scholarship and was also selected as the Gold Disruptor ICT Researcher of the Year at the Australian Computer Society’s Digital Disruptor Awards.

Mustafa’s research interests include pain in non-verbal populations, geriatric pharmacotherapy, gerontology, pain education, pain management, dementia care and clinical pharmacy. Mustafa has also an extensive teaching experience across a broad range of subjects in health sciences and pharmacy practice.