User innovation & behavioral invention
How people devise new behaviors, practices, and systems when available products or services do not fit their lives.
Research · innovation · care
I study how people create, adapt, and care.
Interdisciplinary researcher and innovation strategist working across user innovation, women’s health, family life, social epidemiology, healthcare, and human-centered research.
ScD · Social epidemiologyMIT Sloan · Harvard T.H. Chan · UCSF
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The central question
What can we learn when we see people as active inventors of their own lives?
Much research begins with deficits: unmet needs, poor adherence, broken systems. My work begins with a complementary question. What have people already figured out?
I examine the practices people create, the communities through which ideas travel, and the products and institutions that can support those insights without flattening their context.
More about my approachResearch areas
Connected questions, studied across disciplines.
Women’s health across the life course
How needs, responsibilities, health conditions, and curiosity shape women’s problem-solving over time.
Care, family life & systems of use
How products, relationships, routines, environments, and knowledge combine into workable everyday systems.
Human-centered healthcare research
How close study of patients, clinicians, and communities can make services and interventions more useful and humane.
Selected work
Ideas designed to travel.
Behavioral innovation
A new concept and machine learning-enabled approach for identifying novel problem-solving behaviors in online communities.
The public as innovators
An assets-based model that treats people not only as recipients of interventions, but as developers of valuable solutions.
Women taking wellbeing into their own hands
Research on self-educated and peer-recommended practices developed by women during and after breast cancer treatment.
Collaboration & speaking
Let’s make overlooked knowledge visible.
I collaborate with researchers, healthcare teams, organizations, and communities working on complex questions about health, care, and innovation.
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