Bio


Leticia Britos Cavagnaro, Ph.D., is co-Director of the University Innovation Fellows, a program of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school), which empowers students to be co-designers of their education, in collaboration with faculty and leaders at their schools. Leticia was Deputy Director of the National Center for Engineering Pathways to Innovation (Epicenter), an NSF-funded initiative that operated from 2011 to 2016 to foster innovation and entrepreneurship in engineering education nationwide. She is an adjunct professor at the d.school, where she teaches Stanford students of all disciplines how to build their creative confidence to become engines of innovation in teams and organizations. Leticia has a Ph.D. in Developmental Biology from Stanford's School of Medicine, and is a former member of the Research in Education & Design Lab (REDlab) at Stanford’s School of Education. Having witnessed the journey of students who are transformed by their experience at the d.school, bringing design thinking to more people beyond Stanford has become a priority for Leticia, and she has worked with hundreds of educators and students of all ages, as well as corporate and non-profit leaders in the US and abroad. In the Summer of 2013, Leticia engaged thousands of people from over 130 countries in learning design thinking and applying the methodology to innovate in their contexts, via an experiential MOOC (http://novoed.com/designthinking).

Find out more about Leticia's work at:
http://universityinnovationfellows.org
Designing for Change: Using social learning to understand organizational transformation (book about the UIF program): https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Change-understand-organizational-transformation/dp/1733735402/
http://epicenter.stanford.edu
http://teachingcommons.stanford.edu/teaching-talk/design-thinking-action-lab-1

Connect with Leticia:
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/pub/leticia-britos-cavagnaro/9/b4a/752/
Twitter: @LeticiaBritosC (twitter.com/leticiabritosc)

Academic Appointments


  • Adjunct Professor, Hasso Plattner Institute of Design

2022-23 Courses


All Publications


  • An Innovators' Movement Does America Need More Innovators? Britos Cavagnaro, L. C., Fasihuddin, H. 2019: 25–50
  • A Moonshot Approach to Change in Higher Education: Creativity, Innovation, and the Redesign of Academia Britos Cavagnaro, L., Fasihuddin, H. Association of American Colleges & Universities. 2016 ; Liberal Education