Meet the Team: Hannah

I’ve mentioned Hannah before: she is one of our team members from Newcastle University, and attended the training day with me last month. It was a lot of fun chatting with her that day, and we agreed to have frequent Skype calls over the next couple of months as we are finalising our exhibit. I can’t wait to see her again at the exhibition!

Hello, I’m Hannah Jones.

How do you create solutions that meet the needs and desires of a user group? In my role as Research Project Manager at Newcastle University, that’s one of many questions that I’m continually asking. The joy of working within the team at Newcastle, is the clear focus and purpose of the research that we do, which ultimately benefits a user, in our case, a person.

My academic background is in Industrial Design at Northumbria School of Design. During my undergraduate course, I studied at Strate School of Design in Paris, and gained a Master of Arts scholarship from Intel in my final year. During this five year period, I developed an interest and knowledge-base for methods in which to identify user group needs and desires, in order to create meaningful solutions, with the mantra of form follows function.

Before joining the Newcastle team, I worked for an innovation management firm. During my six years there, I worked with a range of healthcare companies such as Philips and Johnson & Johnson, on projects that focused on improving Research and Development approaches and methodologies. Following suit, many of the projects were tailored to advancing research-based projects that identified user needs. This experience further enhanced my interest for this angle of work.

Since joining the team at Newcastle in the summer of 2016, I have been working closely with project partners at our local NHS hospital that specialises in rehabilitation, including prosthetic treatment and care for people with limb loss. I believe that having our user population at the heart of the team’s ethos is critically important to ensuring that the research we conduct has direct benefit to the people who need it.

The plans for our summer exhibition are really taking shape now and I’m looking forward to meeting you all in the summer!