Dr Gabriella Spinelli
Director of Innovation and Digital Health/Reader

Summary

Dr Spinelli researches and explores resilience as the outcome of the interplay between technology, health and wellbeing, and communities. With a background in Computer Science and Information Systems, she analyses, evaluates, and redesigns complex systems and products from technology platforms enabling civic participation and community development to medical products to improve care outcomes, patients’ experience, and sustainable healthcare. Through a socio-technical approach Dr Spinelli focuses on the development of innovative technology and products that are intuitive and effective by supporting people in representing, and processing information, to make decisions and execute tasks. She is an international expert in participatory design engineering methods that enable consensus creation early in the innovation cycle, leading to design interventions that are understood, supported by shared values and more likely to be adopted. She has delivered against large multidisciplinary projects funded by several UK and international research councils, adopting a people-centred ethos to ensure research integrity and inclusion. In 2016, together with late Professor Heinz Wolff, she funded Give and Take Care, a Community Interest Company that received in excess of £1M funds to rethink social care models in communities.  Dr Spinelli teaches Human Factors, and she leads a collaborative design engineering programme, Design for Health and Wellbeing, with the NHS. This programme has generated more than 60 new clinical products that have attracted awards, grants and investments.

Dr Spinelli has several responsibilities outside the University. She is a member of Home Office Scientific Advisory Council (HOSAC), a member of the EPSRC Peer Review College, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine ( FRSM) and of the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (FRSA), and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA).