Leticia Britos Cavagnaro

Picture this: a scientist in San Francisco tinkering with a homemade teleporter to visit her birthplace in Uruguay. That’s Leticia — and while she hasn’t cracked teleportation (yet), she’s mastered something equally magical at the Stanford’s d.school: transforming how we teach and learn.
Leticia’s journey from a lab bench to design began with a PhD from Stanford bridging biology and computer science. She found the d.school back when it was housed in a temporary trailer. She fell in love with design and never looked back.
These days she guides MS design students as they reflect, create, and tackle ambitious projects that matter.
One of the favorite parts of her work is to collaborate with educators seeking to use design to reimagine their practice. She does this as a mastermind of the d.school signature offering for educators, the Teaching and Learning Studio (aka TLS). Her superpower? Using emerging tech to create experiences and tools that change how we learn.
Her book Experiments in Reflection started with a simple question: what if we could see our past and present differently to shape bolder futures? She put this philosophy into action when co-creating the University Innovation Fellows — a global movement of students redesigning their own education.
Before all this, she sparked innovation in engineering education across the U.S., leading a National Science Foundation center at Stanford’s Management Science & Engineering department.
These days, you’ll find her in San Francisco with her husband, probably sketching out new experiments — or maybe finally solving that teleportation puzzle.