Sara Laura Wilson

Sara Laura Wilson is a graduate student in mechanical engineering where she bridges behavioral science and life cycle assessment to predict real-world product environmental impacts. Fifty to 80% of consumer product impact occurs during use, yet design workflows ignore actual user behavior patterns. Sara implements end-to-end data processing pipelines transforming behavioral data from 430 participants into quantitative inputs through agglomerative hierarchical clustering and the MATLAB Statistics and Machine Learning Toolbox. She performs Bayesian inference and Monte Carlo simulations across thousands of participant-concept scenarios to propagate behavioral uncertainty through to environmental outcomes. Her probabilistic framework captures behavioral heterogeneity deterministic methods cannot address. As a MathWorks Fellow, Sara will scale workflows using the Parallel Computing Toolbox and develop persona-specific intervention models with the Optimization Toolbox. This framework opens new possibilities for designing products that align with actual user values rather than idealized assumptions.