Encouraging out-of-the-box thinking among her students has become a specialty of Stacy Landreth Grau, associate professor of medical education and the associate dean of the John V. Roach Honors College, who focuses on innovation and design thinking.

Grau, along with Cedric James ’13 (MEd ’20), director of student engagement at the Institute of Entrepreneurship & Innovation, created the human-centered Design Week, one of the four FAB Weeks in 2022.

Design thinking involves framing and scoping a problem to solve, researching that problem, testing a range of hypotheses and, finally, developing prototypes.

“Design thinking is so useful because it’s all based on the user,” Grau said. “I’m here to help the students identify problems from a human-centered perspective and provide tools and mindsets to develop really impactful and creative solutions.”

Her collaboration with the medical school focuses on giving the students the tools they need to view a community as a system and determine health care’s role within that.

“A friend and I were talking about how cancer diagnosis needs a redesign,” Grau said. “As a patient you have all these different tests and treatments, which are already pretty cumbersome. Then you overlay the complete and utter devastation of that first diagnosis. It’s a hard system to navigate.”

For the FAB Week in October 2022, Grau and James asked students to re-imagine how technology is used in medicine. Groups considered everyone from children and pregnant women to adults over 70 and people struggling with chronic illness.

Winston Scambler, now in his second year at Burnett, worked with five fellow medical students to design an interactive mirror to help injured adults. The mirror would enable users to livestream sessions with a physical therapist with the goal of increasing compliance and making sure the patient does the exercises correctly, thereby decreasing the risk of re-injury.

While the week proved a big departure from typical academics or simulated patient care sessions, Scambler said he found it valuable in part because of the interactions with his cohort.

As a physician, you have to be able to be a servant leader in a lot of ways,” he said. “[In] medicine you may bump heads from time to time, but you need to get along and you need to be professional, which is what something like FAB Week teaches.”

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