Teaching Team
Instructor: Emily Au
Dr. Emily Y.L. Au currently works as Operations Director in a fabless semiconductor company (www.etopus.com). She applies the User Experience (UX) strategy to design workflow and operations to drive continuous improvement and manage change into standard best practices in a startup company. Apart from her full-time job, she has been teaching part-time at Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation at UC Berkeley since 2017.
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Prior to her current position, she was an Assistant Professor of Engineering Education at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) in Hong Kong, and she was working as a User Experience Researcher in Honeywell (Shanghai). Dr. Au received a Mphil (2001) degree in the area of Quality Engineering and a PhD (2008) degree in the area of Human Factors and Ergonomics from the HKUST. She has been serving as an academic journal reviewer (including Applied Ergonomics, International Journal of Industrial Ergonomics, etc) since 2011.
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GSI: Effie Jia
Effie Jia is currently a first-year Master of Design student at UC Berkeley. She recently graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Art and Design from MIT, where she also minored in Environment & Sustainability. She loves to build things, draw, travel, hike, garden, and make Spotify playlists. Her interests range from fabrication to sustainability to literature and more.
In the past, she has worked in research, industry, and campus roles. Some of her favorite experiences have been working at an escape room company, at the MIT Office of Sustainability, and at a greenhouse school in Israel. Effie is passionate about exploring ways in which design can create a healthier individual, community, and earth.
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