A higher ed student program that expanded globally under the d.school’s direction has been adopted by a university in The Netherlands.
The University Innovation Fellows (UIF), co-founded by d.school educators Leticia Britos Cavagnaro and Humera Fasihuddin, empowers students and educators to become agents of change at their schools. As of February 24, 2025, the UIF program has moved to a new home at the DesignLab at the University of Twente in the Netherlands.
The program was created in 2012 as part of the National Center for Engineering Pathways to Innovation (Epicenter), a five-year National Science Foundation grant hosted by Stanford University and nonprofit VentureWell. In 2016, the d.school began management of the program.
Under the leadership of Leticia and Humera at the d.school, the UIF program expanded globally and launched a program for Historically Black Colleges and Universities. The team trained more than 3,300 Fellows, held more than a dozen large-scale UIF Meetups in the U.S., UAE, India, and the Netherlands; and published the community’s accomplishments in a book and several journals.
The transition of the program to the University of Twente has been two years in the making for the UIF team.
“Twente is a natural new center of gravity for the program,” said Humera. “UIF has always been a place where change is created for students, by students, and Twente has student-centrism baked into its DNA.”
DesignLab has been the home base for 60 student Fellows in the last 8 years, making it one of the longest collaborators in UIF. Twente was the host of the 2024 UIF Meetup, as well as several UIF European Meetups. Miriam Iliohan, co-founder and Manager at DesignLab, has been a leader in the program’s faculty community for many years.
The program team will work with Twente this year as advisors during the transition, and many members of the UIF alumni community will be serving as mentors.
"The real strength of any initiative lies in its ability to disrupt itself and evolve with the times,” said Leticia. “Building on an incredibly successful era that demonstrated the power of students as co-designers of their education and change agents capable of catalyzing institutional change, the UIF program (and movement!) is bound to reach new heights under University of Twente’s leadership. To infinity. . . and beyond!”