Yakira Mirabito, Ph.D.

Hi, I am a postdoctoral fellow at MIT, where I study decision-making in design and innovation. My research focuses on a central question: Which ideas advance, and why? I examine how decision-makers search, evaluate, and select among alternatives, how people and organizations shape these processes, and how these decisions are justified and documented.

I use a mixed-methods approach that combines experiments, interviews, observational studies, and computational text analysis. My work bridges engineering design and innovation management, drawing on behavioral decision theory and organizational perspectives. Across my work, I aim not only to understand why innovation decisions unfold as they do, but also to translate these insights into methods, tools, and practices that help practitioners navigate increasing evaluative demands and develop safer, more innovative products.

At MIT, I work with Maria Yang in the Ideation Lab and am funded through the MIT Postdoctoral Fellowship for Engineering Excellence. I completed my PhD in mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley, advised by Kosa Goucher-Lambert in the Cognition and Computation in Design (Co-Design) Lab. I hold a BSc in Materials Science and Engineering from Northwestern University and have collaborated with researchers at ETH Zurich, the Technical University of Munich, and the University of Pisa. My research has been supported by the NSF GRFP and UC Berkeley’s Chancellor’s Fellowship and recognized by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers.