Francesca Barrientos, PhD, currently works as a design strategist in the Cloud and Network Security group at Cisco where she connects research, design, business, and technology. She sometimes puts on her research hat to study her own organization, recently using her research and storytelling skills to define organization specific design maturity principals that are used to shape new business processes and experiments.

A design thinker and facilitator, she helped formulate the Cisco Design Thinking Process and was a main contributor to the _Getting Started with Cisco Design Thinking Book_. Before coming to Cisco, she was a research scientist in complex systems design theory and methodology at NASA. She holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley and trained in mechanical and aerospace engineering.