Eat.Think.Design is co-taught by Jaspal Sandhu and Kristine Madsen. Taiki Nishihara and Andrea Seet are the course interns. Nap Hosang co-taught the course from 2011-2017.

Jaspal teaches in the Division of Community Health Sciences in the School of Public Health. Since 2016, he has been the lead faculty for the Fung Fellowship for Wellness and Technology Innovations. He is co-founder and managing partner at the Gobee Group, a social innovation and design consultancy that works globally and in the US. At Gobee, he manages the health portfolio, which encompasses public health and healthcare, and leads design efforts across sectors.

Kris is Associate Professor in the Joint Medical Program and Public Health Nutrition, and – since 2017 – the faculty director for the Berkeley Food Institute. Kris is a pediatrician and research scientist. With funding from the NIH, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, American Heart Association, and other agencies, Kris and her teams work to identify programs and policies that will reduce childhood obesity and its attendant health disparities.

Nap is CEO of Cadence Health. He previously led the startup of the the On-Campus Online Professional MPH Degree Program (OOMPH), a program which he directed for five years. Prior to that, he headed the Interdisciplinary MPH program for 15 years. He is a retired physician and administrator from Kaiser Permanente. He is Chairman of the Board at Impact Carbon, a non-profit focused on reducing indoor air pollution in developing countries using simple, accessible technologies. From 2007-2015, he served as Chairman of the Board at Venture Strategies Innovations, a non-profit that championed the registration of Misoprostol – a drug used to prevent women dying in childbirth – in over 15 developing countries.

Faculty: Eat.Think.Design. is the current incarnation of Designing Innovative Public Health Solutions, which was originally designed by Jaspal Sandhu and Nap Hosang. These two taught the course starting with its inception in 2010. Kristine Madsen joined the team in Spring 2014 with the new focus on food: Eat.Think.Design. Nap Hosang’s final year teaching the course was 2017. The continuous development and improvement of the course has been an ongoing team effort.

Teaching assistants: Critical to the success of the course has been the contribution of the teaching assistants, the course interns and graduate student instructors: Sona Makker (2011), Shannon Hamilton (2012), Victoria Tecca (2013), Joyce Liu (2014), Alissa Bernstein (2015), Lila Rubenstein (2016), Hailey Zhou (2016), Alicia Kim (2017), and Serena Wu (2017). The teaching assistants provided critical support in research, instruction, and coordination. Each course intern in the first four years worked on an independent innovation project with an external client: The Suitcase Clinic (Sona), Diabetes Hands Foundation (Shannon), Cal Football (Victoria), and Sariwa (Joyce). Here’s where they are today:

  • Sona graduated from Santa Clara University’s Law School in 2016. She has worked at Rock Health, Sensity Systems (Verizon), and the Office of Kamala Harris. She now works on privacy and public policy issues at Facebook.
  • Shannon worked as a Senior Associate at the Gobee Group for three years, where she focused on data and design innovation in global health and healthcare. She is currently completing the final year of  a Master’s degree in data science at UC Berkeley’s School of Information.
  • Victoria is in the final year of her medical training at Tulane University. Before medical school, she worked in healthcare consulting.
  • Joyce earned a Master’s in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon and has worked since 2015 as an interaction designer for Google.
  • Alissa completed the PhD program in Medical Anthropology at UC Berkeley, as well as a Master’s in Public Health. After Berkeley, she worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the UCSF Institute for Health Policy Studies. Starting in 2016, she became an Atlantic Fellow at the Global Brain Health Institute.
  • Lila graduated in 2016 with a Master of Public Health and a Master of City Planning (MPH/MCP),  with a focus on Environmental Health Science. She then worked research analyst with Center for Community Innovation (CCI), which aims to understand the social impacts of housing evictions in the San Francisco Bay Area. Today she works as a Design Strategist at Capacity for Health.
  • Hailey is a fourth-year undergraduate in Nutritional Sciences. She has led a 30-plus student Fermentation Foods DeCal course, worked as a sports nutrition intern with Cal Athletics, and is a co-founder and president of the FoodInno Club, which hosts on-campus food hackathons. In winter 2016-2017, Hailey interned at IDEO in Shanghai.
  • Alicia is a third-year undergraduate majoring in Cognitive Science. She is the co-lead of CS Kickstart, a UC Berkeley program introducing Computer Science to female first-year students. Starting in 2017, she has been a Business and Economy Beat Reporter for the Daily Cal.
  • Serena graduated in 2017 with a BA in Cognitive Science. She was an active dancer and choreographer at Berkeley, including as Head Coordinator for TrueLement Dance, where she managed 40 dancers. She now works as a media analyst at LifeStreet Corporation.
  • Taiki is a fourth-year Molecular Cell Biology undergraduate. He is currently the president of the Sage Mentorship Project, and the founder and president of the Global Medical Training at Berkeley.
  • Andrea is in the final year of majoring in Public Health and minoring in Education and Cal Teach. She has interned at the National Association of Community Health Centers in Washington, DC, and studied abroad public health in the Netherlands.

Students: Unlike most courses, where the success of the course is determined by the faculty and the curriculum, Designing Innovative Public Health Solutions relies on the talent and diversity of its students to determine its success. This course has been fortunate to have access to the strongest innovators and systems thinkers at Berkeley. Between 2011-2016, students have come from more than 25 different graduate programs and disciplines, at UC Berkeley and beyond, including:

  • Architecture
  • Bioengineering (Master of Translational Medicine)
  • Business (Haas/MBA)
  • City & Regional Planning
  • Computer Science
  • Dental Public Health (UC San Francisco)
  • DrPH
  • Electrical Engineering
  • Energy & Resources Group
  • Environmental Engineering
  • Environmental Health
  • Environmental Science, Policy & Management
  • Epidemiology
  • Health Policy & Management
  • Health & Social Behavior
  • Infectious Disease & Virology
  • Interdisciplinary MPH
  • Joint Medical Program (UC San Francisco)
  • Journalism
  • Maternal & Child Health
  • Mechanical Engineering
  • Medicine (Stanford University, UC San Diego)
  • Neuroscience
  • Public Policy (Goldman/MPP)
  • Public Health Nutrition
  • School of Information