TITLE : Graduate Student

RESEARCH INTERESTS:
design processes, design teams

Katherine Fu, Ph.D. Candidate

Katherine is a fourth year Research Assistant and PhD candidate, co-advised by Dr. Jonathan Cagan and Dr. Kenneth Kotovsky, Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. Her work has focused on studying the engineering design team process through cognitive studies with senior mechanical engineering undergraduate students.

She has examined how engineering design teams converge upon a solution to a design problem and how their solution is influenced by information given to them prior to problem solving. Her research is now moving toward exploring analogical inspiration and building computational design tools to aid designers during the engineering design process.

Katherine co-instructed Integrated Product Development in the Spring of 2009 with Dr. Peter Boatwright, Professor of Marketing in the Tepper School of Business, and Eric Anderson, Professor of Design in the Design School. The course is cross-listed between the Mechanical Engineering Department, the Design School, and the Tepper School of Business. In this role, she worked with interdisciplinary teams of senior undergraduate and masters level design students, masters and PhD level mechanical engineering students, and MBA students, to design new products for a corporate sponsor, MSA (Mine Safety Appliances), for construction and highway safety applications.

Katherine is the recipient of the ARCS Foundation Lawrence J. Rhoades Memorial Award for 2007- 2008, 2008-2009, and 2009-2010, and the John and Claire Bertucci Graduate Fellowship for 2010-2011.