Mini profile: Dr Chiara Garattini

Dr Chiara Garattini is a socio-cultural anthropologist who investigates how people interact with technologies in health and life sciences.

She is on Intel Corporation’s UK Health Innovation team hosted at Imperial.

What is your role at Intel?

I am a user experience researcher in Intel’s Health and Life Science group. I contribute to the design process by gaining deeper insights in the way people understand and interact with technology. We are trained to explore how people think about the technologies they use, both at a surface level and at deeper underlying levels. I have a particular interest the challenges of translating technology from the lab to the real world.

Why are you now based at Imperial?

The Intel UK Health Innovation team is a group of Intel employees co-located at Imperial under a formal collaboration arrangement. We are here to work with the College to study technology needs and explore proofs of concepts in UK hospitals, the pharmaceutical industry and life science experts. We are hosted by Professor Guang-Zhong Yang at the Institute of Global Health Innovation and our multidisciplinary team will bring together expertise in high- performance computing, bioinformatics, big data visualisation, health database management, interface design and user experience. We want to partner with academics who are bringing new, cutting-edge techniques to benefit patients.

What will be some of the key challenges?

The clinical application of genetic sequencing and analysis, for example, will raise big challenges from a social, ethical, economic, regulatory, and medical point of view. Different stake-holders – from lab technicians, to doctors, pharmacists and patients – will have different skill sets, knowledge and expectations when interacting with these kind of data. By looking at the cur - rent workflow and dataflow in a research setting, we can gain a better understanding of these technologies and how they might be used more effectively.