About — Maria Yen

I'm Maria.

I spent twenty years leading strategy and innovation in healthcare.

What inspires me

I spent twenty years leading strategy and innovation in healthcare. I sat in important rooms where important decisions got made, and I got good at the work: seeing what is coming, building frameworks, moving systems at scale. And the whole time, one thing would not leave me alone. We were brilliant at building around what people could produce. The moment someone stopped producing, because they got old, or sick, or the world changed around them, our systems did not know what to do with them.

So I followed the question. I am now a PhD researcher in Transition Design at Carnegie Mellon, studying what it takes for communities to define their own worth and have the world respond.

I move through the work as a researcher, a builder, a cultivator, and a practitioner. I ground ideas in thinking that holds up. I build tools and spaces. I create environments where other people can do their best thinking. And I share what I learn, because knowledge that stays in a room is not serving anyone.

What drives me is simple. I believe people are the point. Not as a slogan. As an operating principle.

Why Humanness

Humanness is the work. I am the person doing it.

When you find me, you find someone with a point of view and twenty years of watching what happens when systems forget people. When you find the Humanness Project, you find something bigger than me: a body of ideas, research, and tools built to last.

I am the door. Humanness is the room you walk into. And the door is always open.

Let’s start a conversation

Contact

I'm Maria. I spent twenty years leading strategy and innovation in healthcare.

I'm Maria.

I spent twenty years leading strategy and innovation in healthcare.