Jaspal S. ​Sandhu, PhD

Biography

Jaspal S. Sandhu drives global public health innovation through human-centered design practice, teaching, and advocacy. He is a Professor of Practice in Maternal, Child & Adolescent health at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health, where he has designed and taught globally unique, interdisciplinary public health innovation courses since 2010. From its founding in 2016 until 2021, he served as the faculty lead for the Fung Fellowship at UC Berkeley, a program that originally merged digital health, human-centered design, and health equity, and that now includes a focus on environmental sustainability. He was managing partner at the Gobee Group, a human-centered design company that he co-founded in 2009 to innovate for the equitable health of populations globally and in the United States. One flagship effort at Gobee was Reimagine Lab, a multi-year effort that developed creative approaches to prevent family and domestic violence across California’s diverse communities far into the future. Prior to Gobee, he worked with the Mongolian Ministry of Health on technology and innovation in rural health systems as a Fulbright scholar, and for the Intel Corporation and the Nokia Research Center. In 2018, he founded Pink Box Stories, a digital platform to share stories of California’s Cambodian immigrant families that own and operate the majority of independent donut shops in the state. He holds a PhD in Design from the University of California, Berkeley, and master’s and bachelor’s degrees in engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He speaks Punjabi, Spanish, and Mongolian.

Research Interests

• Human-centered design for public health and healthcare innovation
• Emerging technologies for community health
• Interdisciplinary, team-based models for educating public health entrepreneurs and innovators

Education

• PhD – Design
  University of California, Berkeley
• SM – Engineering
  Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• SB – Mechanical Engineering
  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Publications

• Google Scholar
• PubMed
• View Selected Publications

Courses Taught

• • PH 290
  • The Art of Public Health
• • PH 298
  • Humanizing Life Course
• • PH188
  • Fung Fellowship Core Course
• • PH 214
  • Eat.Think.Design.
  • Designing Innovative Public Health Solutions

Additional Links

• Reimagine Lab
• Pink Box Stories
• Gobee
• Fung Fellowship