Suzanne Chou is a design researcher and facilitator, focusing on community-centered equitable design projects. Currently, Suzanne is the Community Engagement Coordinator for the Multnomah County Library Capital Bond team, where she leads the community engagement efforts that will help inform the expansion, redesign, and services of several public libraries in Portland and East Multnomah County, OR. She received her Ph.D. from UM in Mechanical Engineering in 2020 and was a 2019 Dow Sustainability Doctoral Fellow. Suzanne’s research focused on the need for considering designer context, in addition to user context, in engineering design in order to achieve more positive design outcomes. For several past projects, Suzanne has conducted international fieldwork for needs-assessments in Panama, Rwanda, Thailand, Chile, as well as various medical settings in the Bay Area, CA.
Suzanne has a B.S. in Bioengineering with a focus on medical devices from the University of California, Berkeley. After college, she worked as an R&D Engineer for a year at LIM Innovations, a startup in San Francisco that develops novel prosthetic sockets for lower limb amputees.