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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

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 &nbsp;helping to apply lauch a successful kickstarter campaign for the University Innovation Fellows programMOBI ([https://trainoutpainperformance.com/products/mobi).&nbsp https://trainoutpainperformance.com/products/mobi]/)&nbsp;

As a fellow, KC worked on a variety of things, but her largest success story was changing the freshman engineering curriculum to include innovation, entrepreneruial thinking, and design thinking. Now every student at Grand Valley will be exposed to project-based learning using the design thinking process in their first year. She is currently trying studying the effect of this change on student outcomes and is hoping to tackle write about using design thinking in enginering pedagogy eventually. KC is now an advisor for the current fellows at her school and is in charge of recruiting and managing the applications with the lack faculty chamption, Dr. Paul Lane. While it might seem like a small task for some schools, another one of communication KC's largest accomplishments as a fellow was simply finding a sustainable funding source and home for the fellows program within Grand Valley.&nbsp;interdiciplinary projects between  In the engineeringpast two years, businessKC has begun to expand some of her work interationally, and biomedical science programs at her universtiyfrequently travels to Nicaragua to promote innovation, practice empathy, and she believes that if there were more programs that collectively utilized these students' strengths that there would be a dramatic increase in innovation run workshops at GVSUthe largest national univeristy, UNAN-Managua. Looking into the futureIn Fall of 2017, KC's dream is helped to expand the fellows program to continue her passion for learning by attending graduate school UNAN as the first central american university in either business or engineeringthe program. Additionally, this experience has allowed KC currently works as an engineering co-op the opportunity to be a part of a group of faculty at Charter House Innovations in ZeelandGrand Valley focused on providing mentoring, advice, MI and enjoys camping, running, design thinking workshops to students and a good craft beerfaculty accross campus.&nbsp; [Updated June 2018]

[http://youtu.be/RH7qA0P-_JI http://youtu.be/RH7qA0P-_JIintro video coming soon!]

[[categoryCategory: student contributorsStudent Contributors|k]][[Category:Student Contributors]]