Liz Chen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Health Behavior at the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her work sits at the intersection of public health, human-centered design, and social innovation, with a focus on strengthening how design thinking is taught, practiced, and studied in public health. She has applied design thinking methods across research in adolescent and young adult health, nutrition, education, and other areas and teaches graduate courses in design thinking and rapid prototyping. Her recent scholarship examines how human-centered design can complement qualitative research, including forthcoming work demonstrating how, when applied intentionally, design thinking methods can support culturally responsive research. She is also co-author of The Experimentation Field Book, a practical guide to using rapid experimentation to learn, reduce risk, and improve solutions.

Here are three articles that she has authored or co-authored that integrate qualitative research methods with design thinking:

• Chen, E., Bishop, J., Guge Cozon, L., Hernandez, E., Sadeghzadeh, C., Bradley, M., Dearth-Wesley, T. & De Marco, M. (2023). Integrating Human-Centered Design Methods Into a Health Promotion Project: Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Education Case Study for Intervention Design. JMIR Formative Research, 7, e37515.
• Skywark, E. R., Chen, E., & Jagannathan, V. (2022). Using the Design Thinking Process to Co-create a New, Interdisciplinary Design Thinking Course to Train 21st Century Graduate Students. Frontiers in Public Health, 9, 777869.
• Leos, C., Chen, E., & Jagannathan, V. (2023). Using Human-Centered Design Strategies to Identify Unmet Adolescent Sexual Health Wants and Needs. Prevention Science, 1-11.