Friday, November 14, 2025
12:00pm-1:00pm
Mechanical Engineering Building, MC102
5 King's College Road
Interested members of the U of T community who would like to attend the seminars can email Kendra Hunter at hunter@mie.utoronto.ca
Professor Ayse Gurses, PhD, MS, MPH
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
Engineering Resilient Care Systems: A System-of-Systems Approach to Enhancing Safety and Quality of Care
Abstract
Care delivery relies on the coordinated performance of interdependent teams, technologies, and organizations—a system of systems. Yet improvement efforts often target individual components, overlooking how safety and quality emerge from their interactions. This presentation introduces a system-of-systems approach to engineering resilient care systems that can anticipate, adapt, and recover amid variability and disruption. Grounded in human factors and systems engineering, the approach emphasizes aligning work (as done), technology, and organizational design to strengthen adaptive capacity and sustain performance. Drawing on examples spanning the care continuum (i.e., emergency care, operating room, primary care, and home care), Dr. Gurses will illustrate how uncovering the often ‘invisible’ cognitive and coordination work of clinicians and patients exposes system vulnerabilities and strengths, and informs design strategies that foster resilience.
Biography
Dr. Gurses is a globally recognized researcher, educator, and thought leader in applying human factors and systems engineering to health care work systems to enhance safety, quality, and value. She is the Founding Director of the Center for Health Care Human Factors at the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality and a Professor in the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, Bloomberg School of Public Health and Whiting School of Engineering. She has authored over 150 peer-reviewed publications and served as principal or co-principal investigator on numerous research grants and contracts—totaling more than $20 million—from organizations such as AHRQ, CDC, NIH, NSF, private foundations, and industry partners. Dr. Gurses’s current research focuses on human-centered and IT-enabled clinical work system design, modeling cognitive and team work to improve diagnostic safety in emergency departments, engineering pre-hospital care systems for older adults, enhancing the safety of care transitions and handoffs, strengthening patient-care professional partnerships, and redesigning complex clinical work systems to reduce healthcare-associated infections. Her research spans diverse care settings, including prehospital, inpatient, ambulatory, long-term, and home care, as well as transitions across these environments.
Dr. Gurses has served as the Editor or Scientific Editor for the journals of Applied Ergonomics and IIE Transactions on Healthcare Systems Engineering. She also contributed to the National Academies’ 2022 report titled ‘Frameworks for Protecting Workers and the Public from Inhalation Hazards’ as a member of its ad hoc committee. She was one of 15 invited experts at the AHRQ Director’s Roundtable, A Call to Action to Improve Healthcare Safety Significantly and Sustainably. Dr. Gurses’s contributions to the science of safety have earned multiple national and international awards, including the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences Foundation Award, the Liberty Mutual Award for Safety, the International Ergonomics Association’s Best Paper Award in Occupational Safety and Ergonomics, and the Robert R. Hoffman Award for Best Contributions to Naturalistic Decision Making Methodology.
MIE’s Distinguished Seminar Series features top international researchers and leading experts across major areas of Mechanical Engineering and Industrial Engineering. The speakers present about their latest research and offer their perspectives on the current state of their field. The seminars are part of the program requirements for MIE Master of Applied Science and PhD students. The Distinguished Seminar Series is coordinated for 2025-2026 by Professor Enid Montague.
View all upcoming MIE Distinguished Seminars.