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Marina Rakhilin is a social worker, researcher, and designer as well as a part-time professor teaching courses in the Ï㽶ÐãSSW Design Thinking for Social Change certificate program.

They bring a history of designing psychosocial interventions in a variety of research settings, whether with industry, community partners, academic institutions, or hospital systems. These include a community co-designed mHealth training for mental health care providers on best practices for working with transgender and gender diverse youth, an online behavioral activation intervention combined with the use of Fitbits for adults struggling with clinical depression, as well as a version of a Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) manual tailored for use by paraprofessionals with previously incarcerated young men.

As a Program Manager at the , Marina works within the Translational Research Team to bring ideas into the real world via pilot studies. This work includes democratizing access to qualitative research methods, injecting technology into the Citizens’ Assembly model, and training both students and staff in group facilitation best practices.

Marina strongly believes in inviting more social workers and community members into research spaces and the possibility of leveraging technology to provide non-academics the training and support to do so confidently. After all, everyone can and should have a voice in the decision-making processes that affect them. Design thinking skills lend themselves well to shifting power back to community members and can make the research process both fun and healing. At its best, design thinking is about deconstructing outdated assumptions about what has to be true and then working collectively to design the world we truly want and deserve.