design lab eric hekler public health technology

Eric Hekler Joins Design Lab Team

UC San Diego Design Lab is excited to welcome Eric Hekler, an Associate Professor in the Department of Family and Public Health at UC San Diego. Hekler hails from Arizona State University where he was an Associate Professor in the School of Nutrition and Health Promotion and the director of the Designing Health Lab. He has recently joined the Design Lab to work at the intersection of his interests in behavioral science, human-centered design, public health, and control systems engineering. Specifically, he wants to explore how to successfully identify and develop behavior change interventions to address unmet needs in our rapidly changing societal contexts.

Hekler is also the Director of the Center for Wireless and Population Health Systems at the Qualcomm Institute at UC San Diego where he is looking to advance his research through studying the evolving digital technologies that are currently tackling complex health problems spanning individuals, families, communities, social networks, and populations.

In collaboration with Design Lab faculty and staff, Steven Dow, Eli Aronoff-Spencer, and Michèle Morris, Hekler is focused on securing grants that empower individuals to build scalable solutions that will drive smart and connected communities. Through leveraging his experience uniting a diversity of voices and perspectives as well as a collaboration with initiatives such as Design for San Diego (D4SD), he is looking forward to creating a sociotechnical platform for individuals to innovate around region-wide challenges such as transportation and housing. Design for San Diego, led by Steven Dow, Assistant Professor of Cognitive Science, presents advocates and passionate citizens with the unique opportunity to engage in the iterative process of design thinking to create transformative impact.

Additionally, Hekler and Morris are pioneering an effort to design a consulting service for local, national, and international partners who seek to incorporate human-centered design complemented with agile methods into their practices. The initiative revolves around spearheading workshops, design challenges, and large scale research projects to educate the broader community about human-centered design principles and effective methods of incorporating design thinking to craft meaningful and powerful solutions across a variety of fields and disciplines.

Each of these opportunities provides an avenue for Hekler to directly interface with and support a community of passionate individuals dedicated to achieving real and sustainable behavior change solutions through the integration of human-centered design. Hekler believes that The Design Lab is an incredible place to contribute to a forward-thinking organization that has a deep understanding of the importance of dynamically adapting solutions to meet the needs of different people and different real-world contexts.

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New Design Lab Faculty Working to Shape the Future of UC San Diego

As a global pioneer in design thinking, research, and invention, The Design Lab prides itself on recruiting the brightest and most innovative minds in the design field. Today, we would like to extend a warm welcome to brand new faculty members Elizabeth Eikey, Haijun Xia, and Edward Wang!

Elizabeth Eikey
From a first-generation undergraduate student at Penn State, then an inquisitive Best Buy employee and finally, to the Assistant Professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Public Health & The Design Lab at UCSD, Dr. Elizabeth Eikey has an illustrious career. Her research work at The Design Lab focuses on the intersection between technology, mental health, and equity, primarily studying the possible applications for technology in supporting mental health and well-being.

Haijun Xia
After receiving his PhD in Computer Science from University of Toronto, Xia made the move across countries to begin his time as a researcher at UC San Diego. ‘I wanted to work at The Design Lab and UC San Diego, because of the diversity of skill here,’ says the Professor, ‘We are all approaching the many challenging research questions from different angles, which is really important to develop comprehensive solutions.

Edward Wang
When Edward Wang was an undergraduate student at Harvey Mudd, he never expected himself to become a researcher, let alone becoming a professor. It was only after a Professor offered him the chance to help design a course she was planning about biosignal processing, that he began on this path. ‘As I was designing the class over summer, I had to read a bunch of papers,’ he says, ‘I couldn’t stop thinking about how cool all of it was. Especially when it branched out into computer science and how it could be involved in biosignal processes.’