Katrina Appell, PhD

Katrina Appell has 15-plus years of coaching, facilitating, training, and team development experience. Previously, she served as a senior lean consultant at Liker Lean Advisors, focusing on supporting organizations in lean product and process development, and as a lean coach at the University of Michigan Health System.

Working with Jeff Liker, PhD, and Jim Morgan, PhD, Katrina’s doctoral research looked at the effectiveness of different approaches to using lean thinking in complex environments through product development case studies. Katrina is currently collaborating with Dan Cooper, PhD, who leads the Resourceful Manufacturing and Design group at the University of Michigan, to build low-carbon manufacturing principles into product and process development systems through lean product-process development. Their goal is to make this thinking more accessible to companies.

Katrina co-developed and teaches LEI’s Designing the Future: A Lean Product & Process Development Immersive Learning Experience workshop. She has previously taught classes for the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in lean manufacturing, lean-six sigma greenbelt, lean healthcare, lean office, lean supply chain for healthcare, lean supply chain, and warehouse management.

Katrina holds a master’s and a doctoral degree in Industrial and Operations Engineering from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. She also has a Bachelor of Science in General Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she is a member and the former president of the Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering Alumni and Advisory Board.

Appell organizes her thinking by blogging at appell.org.