Sonja Paus-Buzink is an assistant professor in Human Factors at the Human-Centered Design department of TU Delft’s faculty of Industrial Design Engineering. She is interested in the integration of human factors/usability evaluation in design processes and in particular for the development of medical devices and services and with an inclusive design perspective. She also enjoys teaching and coaching students in these domains and is involved in various BSc and MSc courses on human factors/usability, research for design and IDE’s Medisign specialisation, and supervises students on research and graduation projects.

Prior to her current position, Sonja worked for a few years outside academia as Managing Human Factors Specialist at UL-Wiklund R&D (now Emergo by UL), applying her research and design skills on a broad range of human factors/usability engineering projects for a broad variety of commercial clients, mostly medical device manufacturers. Besides managing user research and product (re)design activities, she also advised clients on activities required to comply with international medical device regulations.

Her PhD research within IDE’s Medisign research group and co-funded by the Catharina Hospital in Eindhoven aimed at improving the patient safety during image-based procedures; the use of technology in the operating room and for pre-clinical surgical training in skillslabs (e.g., proper application of VR/AR simulation tools). Sonja continued her work on safeguarding patient safety and improving quality of performance in image-based surgery as postdoctoral researcher at IDE and scientific coordinator of the Laparoscopic Surgical Skills programme for the European Association for Endoscopic Surgery (EAES). In her research, she enjoyed working closely together with clinical researchers, engineers and cognitive psychologists from various medical institutes and industry (i.e., simulator companies). 

research interest

• Usability engineering
• Medical device design
• Inclusive design