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Soyoung Kang (she/her) is an assistant teaching professor and Clary Family Foundation early career professor in the mechanical engineering department at the University of Washington (UW). She is also the executive director of the Engineering Innovation in Health (EIH) program that partners teams of multidisciplinary undergraduate and graduate students with health professionals to develop technical solutions to pressing health challenges. Dr. Kang works closely with faculty from across the UW to foster an ecosystem of training and support for students and to develop innovative teaching practices focused on team- and project-based learning.

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Ken Yasuhara (he/him) is the director of the Office for the Advancement of Engineering Teaching & Learning at the UW and serves the College of Engineering as its instructional consultant. Dr. Yasuhara began working as an instructional consultant in late 2015, after several years of experience as an engineering education researcher at UW’s Center for Engineering Learning & Teaching.

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Per Reinhall (he/him) is a professor and recent chair of the Mechanical Engineering Department at the UW. He is a co-founder of UW’s Engineering Innovation in Health Program and a member of the Washington State Academy of Science. He has a long interest in collaborative research and teaching in health. His work in the prevention of brain injury has led to several seminal advances in head protection technology. He obtained his BS degree in Mechanical Engineering from the UW and his MS and PhD in Applied Mechanics from Caltech.

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Kathleen Kearney (she/her) is a master’s student in the mechanical engineering department at the UW and teaching assistant for the EIH program. She is the engineering lead for a project focused on affordable and accessible care for IVs in low-resource settings and works alongside clinical partners at UW Medicine and Seattle Children’s Hospital. Kathleen graduated from the UW with a BS in Mechanical Engineering in 2021 with a focus in biomechanics and has worked at Novo Nordisk as a research operations intern to develop pilot projects in collaboration with the UW.

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Jonathan T.C. Liu (he/him) is a professor of mechanical engineering, bioengineering, and laboratory medicine & pathology at the UW, where his molecular biophotonics laboratory develops high-resolution optical-imaging devices and computational-analysis strategies for guiding treatment decisions. This work is funded by the NCI, NIBIB, DoD, NSF, and various foundations. Dr. Liu has been involved in biodesign education for the past 12 years at multiple institutions. Dr. Liu received his BSE from Princeton, his PhD from Stanford, and his postdoctoral training in the Molecular Imaging Program at Stanford. Dr. Liu is a co-founder and board member of Alpenglow Biosciences Inc., which has commercialized the non-destructive 3D pathology technologies developed in his lab.

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Jonathan Posner (he/him) is the Richard and Victoria Harrington Professor for EIH in mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, and family medicine (adjunct) at the UW. He is a co-founder and the director of the UW EIH program that focuses on developing technical solutions to pressing challenges in health and healthcare. His research group works on a diverse set of need-driven research projects including medical devices, point-of-care in-vitro diagnostics, improved cookstoves for the developing world, and helmets that reduce the risk of concussion. He has founded two companies: VICIS focused on a football helmet that reduces the risk of concussion, and Phoresa focused on point-of-care diagnostics. He was UW Medicine’s Inventor of the Year in 2016.

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Erin Abu-Rish Blakeney (she/her) is a research assistant professor in the biobehavioral nursing and health informatics department at the UW School of Nursing. Dr. Blakeney is also the co-lead of the Institute of Translational Health Sciences (ITHS) Team Science Core. Dr. Blakeney’s program of research focuses on how teams work together and how their teamwork influences the production of new knowledge and translation of research into practice along the entire classroom to bench to bedside spectrum. She has nearly 15 years of experience developing, implementing, and evaluating team approaches to interdisciplinary education, healthcare, and research.

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Eric Seibel (he/him) received his PhD in Bioengineering at the University of Washington in 1996 after working four years in the medical device industry and receiving his BS and MS degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University and University of California at Berkeley. As a research professor in the mechanical engineering department at the UW, Dr. Seibel has been teaching medical device design in an interactive classroom environment for over 5 years and advising student research in biomedical instrumentation for over 20 years. Dr. Seibel has published widely and co-authored 50 issued US patents, many having been licensed to the medical device industry from the UW. Dr. Seibel is director of the Human Photonics Lab and affiliated with the departments of bioengineering, electrical & computer engineering, and oral health sciences at the UW.

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Shayla Payne (she/her) completed the EIH program as an undergraduate student in 2020, when the program transitioned to remote with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. She continued her involvement in EIH as a teaching assistant while completing her master’s degree in the mechanical engineering department at the UW. Incorporating her experiences as a graduate student during a pandemic and an alumni of the EIH program, Shayla helped to introduce new tools and methods allowing the EIH program to adapt and excel in a virtual setting. Currently, Shayla is a mechanical engineer at Dexcom designing the future of health monitoring systems.

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