Liz Chen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Behavior at the Gillings School of Global Health at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is also Design Thinking Lead at Innovate Carolina, the unit at UNC-CH dedicated to innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic development where she works with faculty, staff, and students to integrate design thinking into their teaching, research, and practice. She teaches a popular design thinking course and has applied DT methods into qualitative research in the areas of adolescent sexual health, nutrition, school psychology, urban planning, and more. She has also used DT in qualitative research methods to design a new course.

Here are three recent 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.