Dr. Heidi Ann Hahn serves as Director of the Engineering Capability Development Office at Los Alamos National Laboratory; she is responsible for include developing and implementing enterprise systems engineering processes and practices.  Previously, she was Deputy Project Director for Change Management for the Enterprise Project (implementing enterprise-wide business processes), with responsibility for stakeholder development, communications, reengineering and organizational transition, and end user training. Dr Hahn is also Past President of the International Council of Systems Engineering (INCOSE) Enchantment Chapter

Heidi received a B.A. in psychology from the George Washington University in 1980, and a M.S. in applied behavioral science in 1983 and a Ph.D. in industrial engineering and operations research from Virginia Tech in 1986.

It has been my experience that behavioral science practitioners, including myself, often "back into" action research. That is, we start out doing a process improvement or intervention and discover something along the way, i.e., generalizable knowledge, which seems worthwhile to share with our community of practice. What if, instead of looking at these projects from the point of view of practitioners, we looked at them as research from the outset? Would that change the outcome or generate additional knowledge? This talk will compare and contrast process improvement and action research methods, and will illustrate how use of a research "lens" can enhance behavioral science interventions and the knowledge that may result from them.