Dr. Beth Altringer

Biography

Beth Altringer is a Professor of Practice in Engineering at Brown University, specializing in making learning accessible, visual, interactive, contextual, and delightful through the integration of design, engineering, and creative technology. Her passion is to make invisible concepts visible using innovative design, research, and technological approaches. Her career began with sustainable design during her doctoral research at Cambridge, leading to high-performing innovation teams and a pivot to design firms focused on data-driven product user experience design and learning design. Beth's work has been featured in publications such as Kinfolk, MIT Museum, Forbes, and the Harvard Business Review. She has developed design projects for leading organizations including Kering, Uber, and Disney. In 2021, she directed the joint Master of Arts in Design Engineering (MADE) Program at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design. Her academic background includes a Ph.D. from Cambridge and a Postdoctoral Fellowship at MIT. She has also served as a Visiting Scholar at Stanford and held a position at Harvard's engineering faculty for a decade, co-creating multidisciplinary design engineering courses. Currently, she is working on a book about flavor fluency and expert intuition development in collaboration with chefs and food scientists, exploring how experts understand flavor similarly to how musicians read music.

Research Interests

Experience