Kathleen Sienko, PhD

Kathleen Sienko’s global work focuses on the development of design methodologies, such as design ethnography techniques, stakeholder engagement techniques, and requirement elicitation techniques, to improve global health equity. She directs the Sienko Research Group and Global Health Design Initiative (GHDI), and co-founded the UM Center for Socially Engaged Design (C-SED). Sienko also created and implemented several curricular and co-curricular experiential design offerings through GHDI, which aims to train a new generation of engineers, and more broadly, designers, to communicate and collaborate with stakeholders to identify and define needs and develop and implement solutions to address essential health care challenges. Her interests in global health equity align with the Center themes of strengthening systems of health and providing technical solutions. She leverages both quantitative and qualitative methods to study human-device interactions and inform the design and development of medical devices, with a special emphasis on human- and context-centered design of medical technologies for resource-limited settings.