[[File:KC.png|thumb|KC.png]]
Kathryn Christopher'''Fellow Since''': Fall 2014<br/>'''School''': Grand Valley State UniveristyUniversity<br/>Chriskat@mail'''Interests''': Student experience design, curriculum development and design, business service design, innovation, product design, medical device design, entrepreneurship, engineering, and materials science.gvsu.edu<br/>UIF Fall 2014
'''Get a hold of me! '''<br/>kchristopher00@gmail.com<br/>616-477-2083
Kathryn Christopher usually goes by KC to most of her friends. KC graduated in 2015 with a Bachelors of Science in Engineering, studying Product Design and Manufacturing Enginering at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, MI. Currently, she holds a full-time Visiting Faculty position at GVSU and will complete her Master's in Engineering this summer. She has done research in materials science and medical device development and has experience in entrepreneurship.
Kathryn Christopher, or KC as most has worked on a variety of her friends call her, is things at GVSU since becoming a University Innovation Fellow at Grand Valley State Universtiy fellow there in Grand Rapids2014. In her first year, Michigan. She is a senior she started an innovation club that eventually morphed into the design thinking club at GVSU and is studying Product Design and Manufacturing Engineering. During her junior year, KC is currently working on started a startup medical device company with several other students and Grand Valley State University for , obtaining a medical device designed for patent, completeing the intensive care unitI-Corps Program, and presenting in Open Minds. This project eventually however, that company failed, and since then she has sparked helped contract at several other startups. Some of her interest in entreprenership experience includes freelancing as an experience designer at Thoughtfull Studios ([https://www.thoughtfulldesign.com/ https://www.thoughtfulldesign.com/]) and prompted her helping to apply lauch a successful kickstarter campaign for the University Innovation Fellows programMOBI ([https://trainoutpainperformance.com/products/mobi).  https://trainoutpainperformance. com/products/mobi]/)
She is currently trying to tackle the lack As a fellow, KC worked on a variety of communication and interdiciplinary projects between things, but her largest success story was changing the freshman engineeringcurriculum to include innovation, businessentrepreneruial thinking, and biomedical science programs design thinking. Now every student at her universtiy, and she believes that if there were more programs that collectively utilized these students' strengths that there would Grand Valley will be a dramatic increase exposed to project-based learning using the design thinking process in innovation at GVSUtheir first year. Looking into She is studying the future, KC's dream effect of this change on student outcomes and is hoping to continue her passion for learning by attending graduate school write about using design thinking in either business or engineeringenginering pedagogy eventually. KC currently works as is now an engineering co-op advisor for the current fellows at Charter House Innovations her school and is in Zeeland, MI charge of recruiting and enjoys campingmanaging the applications with the faculty chamption, runningDr. Paul Lane. While it might seem like a small task for some schools, another one of KC's largest accomplishments as a fellow was simply finding a sustainable funding source and a good craft beerhome for the fellows program within Grand Valley.
[[Grand_Valley_State_University|Grand_Valley_State_University]]In the past two years, KC has begun to expand some of her work interationally, and frequently travels to Nicaragua to promote innovation, practice empathy, and run workshops at the largest national univeristy, UNAN-Managua. In Fall of 2017, KC helped to expand the fellows program to UNAN as the first central american university in the program. Additionally, this experience has allowed KC the opportunity to be a part of a group of faculty at Grand Valley focused on providing mentoring, advice, and design thinking workshops to students and faculty accross campus.
[[GVSU_Student_Priorities|GVSU_Student_Priorities]Updated June 2018]
http[[Grand Valley State University|Grand_Valley_State_University]] [[GVSU Student Priorities|GVSU_Student_Priorities]] [intro video coming soon!] [[Category://youtu.be/RH7qA0P-_JIStudent Contributors|k]][[Category:Student Contributors]]