Professor of medicine. PhD in human factors engineering. Living with type 1 diabetes. Infrequent blogger.

Hi there, welcome to my personal and professional site, where I very occasionally publish blog posts.

My research is broadly about digital media for helping people access and understand evidence and make decisions about health. Using my training in human factors engineering, I design for the way people are, rather than for the way we wish they were; and I work to adapt technologies to people, rather than requiring people to adapt to the technologies. My goal is always to design systems that help people.

Other miscellany about me: I am married and have two children. I like running, field sports and being outside doing things like hiking, canoeing, snowshoeing and cross-country skiing. My family and I live in Quebec City, which is unceded traditional territory of the Huron-Wendat. Since living here, we have also taken up downhill skiing, which is much more fun than I knew except that I can no longer keep up with my children. I have been living with type 1 diabetes for over four decades now. I like books and board games. I grew up on Treaty 4 territory in Saskatchewan, where there is no daylight savings. Time changes surprise and frustrate me every spring and fall.

Looking for my bio? Here is a standard version: “Holly Witteman, PhD, is the Canada Research Chair in Human-Centred Digital Health and a Professor in the Department of Family & Emergency Medicine, Université Laval, Quebec City, Canada. Quebec City is unceded traditional territory of the Huron-Wendat. Dr. Witteman is a scientist in the VITAM Research Centre for Sustainable Health, the Research Centre of the CHU de Québec-Université Laval, and an Affiliate Investigator at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute, Ottawa, Canada. With an interdisciplinary background in human factors engineering and social sciences, her research is about how we can achieve human-centredness in health-related domains, including a focus on how best to adapt digital health technology to people rather than expecting people to adapt to technology. She specializes in human-computer interaction in health education, risk communication and decision making, including design methods and system changes to support inclusive user-, human- and patient-centredness. Her work as Principal Investigator has been funded by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Santé (FRQS), the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI, United States), the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), the Canadian Immunization Research Network (CIRN), Sentinelle Nord, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).”

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