Deniz Marti, PhD

About

Deniz Marti is a postdoctoral researcher at the Learning Incubator (LInc) at Harvard. She completed her Ph.D, in Systems Engineering at the George Washington University, and her B.S. in Industrial Engineering at Bogazici University.  

During her doctoral studies, she explored the intersection between engineering and cognitive psychology by taking an interdisciplinary approach that incorporated social science research into engineering solutions. Using human subject research methods, she investigated the cognition of engineering expertise transfer at NASA.

In her current role as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, she provides consulting for Harvard faculty by providing her expertise in research, assessment, and course design. She also conducts research on ways of thinking that are critical for engineering, specifically creative problem solving, reasoning, critical thinking, question-posing, and decision-making under uncertainty. 

Deniz's work has implications for the technical workforce and engineering education, specifically in the context of facilitating engineering expertise development, forming effective engineering teams, and enhancing communication across engineers with varying expertise levels.  

Research tools and methods: experimental design, survey design validation, semi-structured interview, expert elicitation, and performance metric development, multivariate data analysis (e.g., multivariate regression, Exploratory Factor Analysis, advanced computational statistics)  

Research interests: team formation in engineering, motivation for learning, creative ideation, engineering design, reasoning and decision-making, cognitive biases, mental representations, cognition of expertise development.