02/10/24
Cato tells us how she got into design work, neuroscience, and the Gen2020 project
Over the summer, the CAMHS Digital Lab gained a new member: Cato Zantman has joined the Lab as a Research Assistant. She’ll be working on Gen2020, a project looking at how babies' exposure to illness during the prenatal period – including COVID-19 – impacts brain development from birth to childhood. Here, she tells us about how she came to work in design research, and what brought her to working on Gen2020 with the Lab.
How did you become involved in design work?
My road to design work is not a conventional one. I studied neuroscience which is still my greatest passion, but I noticed that I often longed for the ‘next step’; with all this amazing knowledge about how the human brain works, how can we actually apply this to create a better world? So after my studies, I started to focus on health-related User Experience design and Design Thinking. In my career, I hope to keep building the bridge between academic knowledge and applied design research.
What were you doing before you started this role at King’s?
I was a lecturing a Master’s course at the Hasso Plattner Institute, which is the Digital Engineering faculty at Potsdam University (near Berlin). The course was called ‘Neurodesign: Fostering Human-Nature Empathy through Digital Innovation’; it focused on how to apply our knowledge of human empathy to increase people’s attention and behaviours towards sustainability via digital innovations. The lectures were on the intersection between technology, empathy, and sustainable design, building digital support for 'human-nature empathy'. It was incredibly inspiring to teach to students from a completely different field and investigate together how we could implement our joint knowledge to increase sustainability through innovation.
What excites you about the Gen2020 project?
What drew me to the Gen2020 project and my role specifically is precisely the bridge I’ve mentioned before: the project not only focuses on obtaining fundamental knowledge on the effects of the COVID-pandemic, but also applying this knowledge to mitigate the effects of a new pandemic. This immediately inspired me to contribute to this promising project, and I’m happy to be working with the Gen2020 team alongside the CAMHS Digital Lab.