Design Group Instructors

A partial listing of Academic Staff-Teaching & Other Teaching Staff instructors for Design Group courses.  To see current and past teaching assignments, go to  ExploreCourses.

Design Group educators meet regularly to discuss best practices, share challenges and successes, and keep community.  Notes and meeting recordings are available to the Design community.

Adjunct Professor Bill Burnett is Executive Director of the Life Design Lab and the Innovation Masters Series and a best-selling author.

Lecturer Kathy Davies is Managing Director of the Life Design Lab.  Kathy is interested in the design of high impact goods and services, and in the application of design thinking to affect personal and cultural change. She teaches Product Design and Life Design Lab courses.  

Lecturer Dan Somen is the manager of the Product Realization Lab's Room 36 student workspace and project lab in the Huang Engineering Center. He is eager to help give students of all disciplines the tools and confidence to explore their creative ideas through hands-on design.

Adjunct Lecturer Joe Hustein focuses on the interplay of law, business and intellectual property and their effects on strategies in the design and commercialization of technology. He brings more than three decades of experience as an engineer, industrial designer and business lawyer to ME265 Technology Licensing & Commercialization. Hustein has been the general counsel of several Silicon Valley companies.

Adjunct Lecturer David L. Jaffe has interests that include embedded microcomputer systems and alternative user interfaces. He teaches Perspectives in Assistive Technology, a winter quarter course that explores the broad spectrum of issues surrounding the design, development and use of technology that benefits people with disabilities. He is the Associate Director of the Alex Tung Memorial Assistive Technology Laboratory at Stanford (ATLAS).

Senior Lecturer Marlo Dreissigacker Kohn is the Associate Director of the Product Realization Lab. Marlo is interested in elastomeric and injection molded part design and early product design development.

Craig Milroy, Co-Director of the Product Realization Lab (PRL), is a Senior Lecturer and the Mechanical Engineering Department's Director of Undergraduate Teaching Labs.  Milroy has advised thousands of students over more than 30 years in the PRL.  He has strong interest in the medical device industry, has founded three companies and holds 16 US and international patents.

Adjunct Lecturer Jeffrey Schox is a registered patent attorney and the founding member of Schox Patent Group, a boutique patent firm. Drawing on his experience of over 10 years in patent law and his degrees in both mechanical and electrical engineering, he has filed over 250 patent applications in a broad range of cutting-edge technologies.