Sara Colombo

Sara Colombo holds a MS in Design&Engineering and a PhD in Interaction Design from Politecnico di Milano. She spent part of her doctoral studies as a visiting PhD at RISE (Sweden). After her PhD, Sara worked at Politecnico di Milano as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Interaction and Experience Design Lab while being an Adjunct Professor in Design&Engineering and Interaction Design. In 2016, Sara joined Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a Postdoctoral Associate in the Design Lab, where she became a Senior Research Associate and Project Lead in 2017 and a Lecturer in Interaction and Experience Design in 2019. In her work at the MIT Design Lab, Sara adopted design fiction to envision future solutions based on cutting-edge technologies and focused on human experience. She led teams of designers, computer scientists, and engineers in designing ecosystems of digital-physical solutions and in creating working prototypes as proof of concepts of future scenarios. In 2020, Sara worked as a Research Scientist and Principal Investigator at Northeastern University in Boston, where she launched the Design for emergency initiative and was awarded a TIER 1 research grant to explore how design can help to reduce misinformation on social media. She is currently an Affiliated Researcher at the Center for Design at Northeastern University. Since late 2020, Sara joined Eindhoven University of Technology as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Industrial Design.