Katrina Appell, PhD

With over 15 years of coaching, facilitating, training, and team development experience, Katrina is passionate about supporting organizations in lean transformation. She has coached lean principles and practices at many companies in various industries, including Caterpillar, Michigan Medicine, Pella Windows & Doors, TechnipFMC, US Synthetic, and Whirlpool. At LEI, Katrina co-developed and teaches LEI’s Designing the Future: A Lean Product and Process Development Immersive Learning Experience.  

In addition to coaching, Katrina has collaborated with Dan Cooper, PhD, to research how LPPD can enable reducing greenhouse gas emissions and other ecological concerns across a product’s entire lifecycle.  

Earlier in her career, she served as a senior lean consultant at Liker Lean Advisors, focusing on supporting organizations in improving product development using LPPD, and as a lean coach at the University of Michigan Health System. 

Katrina holds a master’s and a doctoral degree in industrial and operations engineering from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Her doctoral research focused on effective methods for putting LPPD principles into practice. She also has a Bachelor of Science in General Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she is a member and the former president of the Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering Alumni and Advisory Board.  

Appell organizes her thinking by blogging at appell.org.