Eleanor Burgess
Eleanor is a former Design Cluster fellow and Northwestern alumni researching and working in human-computer interaction. She investigates how technologies influence human health, looking at the needs of individuals, families, and healthcare providers to create human-centered solutions to help people achieve their health-related goals. Check out her insights on HCI, experiences at Northwestern, and her advice for other scholars.
How does HCI impact how you view or approach challenges in life, society, etc.?
I've loved HCI since the first time I learned about the field in Aaron Shaw's Online Community and Crowds class which I took during my Sophomore fall in my undergraduate program at Northwestern. I knew that I wanted to study how people use technologies and to design tools to power human action beyond what we could do alone. Even a few HCI courses gave such practical skills that I was able to launch two startups based on key things I learned like user needs investigation, participant co-design, and prototyping and iteration. Now that I'm a little further along in my career, looking at life through an HCI lens, there's a future orientation to what many of us designers spend our days thinking about. We see the different avenues where things could change -- tasks, processes, interfaces, products. I see this especially in my current work as a Lead Service Designer at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Helping bring people along in change-making processes through human-centered and participatory design is an essential approach when designing the future.
Why did you choose Northwestern (for your PhD)?
I had a few great grad school options and thought hard about which would be the best fit. When I was an undergraduate student at Northwestern, there weren't yet many health HCI faculty, however, over the course of my Fulbright year in London, several health faculty were hired. Indeed, the number of health technology faculty has only continued to grow across multiple departments at NU over the last 6 or 7 years! I decided I wanted to work with my advisor, Madhu Reddy, who has now moved to UC Irvine.
Could you describe your career path?
I started my career creating websites in my hometown of Tucson, Arizona. Then I earned a BA in Communication Studies at Northwestern with a minor in Global Health. During my undergrad, I created a website for a firefighter association (but learned while testing that the on-the-ground firefighters didn't like it!). This led to my strong focus on user-centered processes which I carried on to my Masters degree in the UK where I founded a startup in Medical HR called Credentially. I then pursued a PhD at Northwestern, publishing a number of papers about health technology and launching a second startup in VR. Using my connections from HCI conferences, I was able to get referred into the application process at Meta and had a wonderful summer internship there. After graduating, I got a job as a UX researcher at Elevance Health. From there, I moved to my current position as a Lead Service Designer at the CDC.
Can you talk more about the intersection of health and AI as it relates to your work? What are the pros and cons of AI in the medical field?
While working at Elevance Health (formerly known as Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield), I worked on several health technology projects involving AI. These projects underscored that AI-powered tools have to 1) fit within current workflows like any new tool and 2) have to be trusted and helpful for folks who may be skeptical of AI. One project (published at CHI'23) involved creating a decision-support tool within the Electronic Health Record (EHR) which used AI to help recommend combinations of medications for Type 2 diabetes. Participants discussed how these AI-powered visualizations could also be used as a shared visual to show patients during tradeoff discussions between medications. Overall, a pro is that models trained on massive datasets, larger than many clinical trials, can provide opportunities for new insights. However, one con is people's understandable cautious approach to these tools. We saw the importance of building trust and also helping clinicians to figure out how to integrate an element into their decision-making process which "thought" differently (was optimized for a particular purpose, using potentially different evaluation methods than a human). We created dropdown filters to move from the general recommendation to specific patient personalization (e.g., fear of needles). To promote trust in and future use of these type of tools, we recommend during the onboarding process to underscore information about the dataset powering the model and to clarify exactly what is optimized by the algorithm(s).
What is one of the most important (or surprising/unexpected) pieces of career advice you would have for early-career scholars and PhD students?
One thing that I didn't think about immediately was if you are a graduate student who wants to work outside of academia after your degree, keep up your networks with friends who are working in industry/government/nonprofits. For example, I once asked one of my old Ultimate Frisbee buddies from undergrad to be a job reference! The PhD program gives you a fantastic academic network which is something enduring that I am deeply thankful for from my PhD program. However, it is also a good idea to keep the rest of your wider network thriving for post-graduation plans!