Monifa Vaughn-Cooke

Dr. Monifa Vaughn-Cooke is an Associate Professor in the Department of Health Systems and Implementation Science at Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine. With a doctorate in Industrial Engineering (human factors specialization) from Penn State, she applies systems engineering and cognitive psychology principles to healthcare technology design. Her research focuses on:

• Human error mitigation in medical systems
• Extended reality (XR) applications for healthcare training
• Digital health design for vulnerable populations
• Medical device risk assessment frameworks

Key research trends in her 15 most recent publications include: computational modeling of human-system interactions (2024), immersive training environments (2023), and medical device/user interface optimization (2022). She has extensive experience in:

• Human factors for heterogeneous populations
• Biomedical data analysis
• Virtual prototyping
• Cognitive workload assessment

Professional activities include serving as Associate Editor for Human Factors in Healthcare and contributing to curriculum development for systems engineering programs at multiple institutions. Her work addresses critical gaps in medical device safety through:

• Structured expert elicitation methods
• Physiological response monitoring
• AI/ML applications for adverse event detection