About
Ryan Tennant is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo. He is co-supervised by Dr. Catherine M Burns and Dr. Kate Mercer. Upon starting his studies, Ryan was awarded the Engineering Excellence Doctoral Fellowship provided by the Faculty of Engineering. In recognition of his research potential, Ryan was honoured with the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Doctoral Scholarship (CGS-D) in 2023.
Ryan's research interests span healthcare and medical device development from a human factors lens. He is primarily interested in designing digital health information technologies that can better support healthcare workers, caregivers and patients in complex settings where information synthesis is required to make critical and timely decisions. His interests have led to collaborations with research groups from the School of Pharmacy on evaluating smart medication packaging and developing a mobile application to support vaccination clinics in managing doses during the COVID-19 mass immunization campaigns.
For his Ph.D., Ryan aims to understand how to better integrate digital technologies that use artificial intelligence (AI) in the clinical environment to support shared clinical decision-making, where he is applying his expertise in the context of pediatric sepsis prediction. His research specifically examines the design of uncertainty-aware AI interfaces to support clinicians in knowing how and when to use AI predictions in their high-stakes decision-making processes, and how and when not to rely on them.
