Who
We Are

How do we do everything we do?
We have incredible coworkers.

Emily Blazer

About us

We are a collection of strategists, entrepreneurs, engineers, artists, marketers, software developers, data scientists, public health professionals, sustainability fanatics & human centered designers. We enjoy living at the center of Design Thinking, Visual Thinking, Business Model Innovation & Sprinting Techniques. This equips us as a team to bring creativity, speed & rigor to the table for ourselves and our customers. We take pride in being your team of super-powered designers, ready to bring any idea to life.

Business Designers

A mixture of HCD scholars, industry experts, and seasoned entrepreneurs with a track record of impactful change.

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Marc McLaughlin

CEO, Partner & Business Designer

Marc is an experienced strategy consultant, business designer and entrepreneur, who is responsible for founding Do Tank back in 2014.

He supports organizations by the use of his bold strategic thinking, creative visual design and practical implementation skills that are ever focused on delivering concrete results.

Marc has an impressive ability to confront the norm and help frame and reduce complexity allowing organizations to discuss, re-design and determine the critical few next steps required to drive strategic change.

With 13+ years of experience with corporates through to start-ups, and within a wide range of industry sectors, he enjoys realizing the successful impact of implementing our new tools, skills and mindsets within organizations.

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Matt Kelly

Partner & Business Designer

Matt is a Partner and Business Designer, based in Chicago, who has been part of the team since its formation in 2014, and is responsible for our office in Chicago.

He assists organizations with alignment and clarity about the current state of their business, competition, economic challenges, and vision for the future.

Matt has over 10 years of experience overseeing the lifecycle of complex organizational development activities. Defining project scope with stakeholders, he is skilled in facilitating synthesis of multiple perspectives into a clear strategy and plan for action. Matt has an undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago and an MBA from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Adam Kohlrus

Partner & Chief Health Strategist

Adam Kohlrus, BA, MS, CPHQ, CPPS is an experienced healthcare consultant and business designer with DoTank Health.

He has worked for more than a decade with hospitals on issues such as readmissions, hospital acquired conditions, patient safety, population health and health equity. In leading state and federally funded quality improvement grants for the Illinois Health and Hospital Association, Adam has experienced the impact design thinking inputs can have in traditional healthcare settings.

He received his Bachelors of Arts in Social Psychology at Loyola University with a minor in Peace Studies and a Master’s of Science in Health Sciences with a concentration in Public Health at Western Illinois University.

Adam also served in the Peace Corps as a Community Health volunteer in both Swaziland, Africa and Guyana, South America before working at Peace Corps headquarters in Washington, DC. Through his work abroad and domestically, Mr. Kohlrus has demonstrated proficiencies in quality improvement, community development, project management, curriculum development, and data analytics.

Leslie Wainwright

Partner & Business Designer

With a career spanning academic research, pharma/biotechnology, and healthcare delivery, Leslie is passionate about entrepreneurship, healthcare, and innovation. She frequently speaks and facilitates discussions on the future of healthcare, enabling technologies, disruptive innovation, growth strategies, and emerging business models.

Leslie has a scientific background in infectious microbiology. She earned her Ph.D. from Northwestern University and completed a fellowship at the University of Maryland’s Center for Vaccine Development. In addition to ACHE, she has served as a faculty member at the Lake Forest Graduate School of Management.

Alex Spiroff
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Alex Spiroff

Business Designer

Alex is a business designer at Do Tank, with a background in human-centered and visual design.

Alex formerly honed her design skills in higher education, guiding university students through the design research process, and working on corporately sponsored innovation consulting projects.
She is particularly interested in the opportunities for innovation and the application of human-centered design in healthcare, and is a passionate believer in health equity and the power of human-centered work to positively affect health outcomes. She believes we have the power as designers and innovators to embrace our unique position and build relationships with the communities we are serving, using our resources and skills to design innovative and impactful solutions for real residents in our communities.

Alex received her Bachelor of Design in Graphic Design from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Shantha Burt

Business Designer

Shantha is a Health Equity and Strategy Consultant at Do Tank with a background in public and global health. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Northwestern University, where she studied Global Health, Psychology, and Data Science, and completed a comparative public and mental health abroad program in Belgrade, Serbia and Sarajevo, Bosnia Herzegovina.

Shantha is passionate about implementing Do Tank’s human centered design process in the healthcare industry. She aims to integrate both qualitative and quantitative research into her projects. With her education focused on social determinants of health and illness narratives, as well as coding and visualizing data in R, she knows the value of both personal testimony and data expression.

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Maximilian Werner

Business Designer

Maximilian is an out-of-the-box marketer with a background in SEO-driven content, copywriting, and email campaigns. He’s written over 150 published articles, created mountains of digital content, and has a knack for discovering the perfect tone.

Max studied psychology, digital communications, and creative writing at North Carolina State University, where he earned two bachelor’s degrees.

When not curating content for Do Tank’s growing client base, Max can be found with his nose in a book or his feet firmly planted on a surf-style skateboard—typically not at the same time.

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Mark Penver

Business Designer

Mark is one of our business designers based in Glasgow with a background in award winning product and service design.

For over a decade, Mark has worked on the front line of innovation for organisations big and small to guide impact of decisions made at the early stages. From this came hard earned lessons which he has put into increasing value in early stage strategy.

Mark has a former career in industrial design and product engineering. He has worked on projects from the bottom of the ocean to space and everything in between from luxuary spirit brands to the arse end of a sheep. Working closely with large multi-nationals to agile start-ups, Mark brings an empathetic approach to business design.

Visual Designers

Illustrators, animators, motion designers, and UI gurus ready to bring your big ideas to life.

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Cat Maciver-White

Visual designer & Animator

Cat is a designer who enjoys producing narrative visuals with graphic and motion design. She relishes the whole design process, aiming to be deliberate and considerate in the creative choices she makes.

Cat has explored the world of infographics, fallen in love with motion design, sketched many an illustration, and gone into the rabbit hole of typography. A lover of storytelling and a visual problem-solver, she loves to form unique and creative solutions to produce engaging and exciting outcomes. Besides her design work, Cat’s other creative outputs have been painting artwork on ceramics, hand lettering, and cooking.

Cat graduated from the Duncan of Jordanston college of Art and Design with a B(Des) in Graphic Design.

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Nefeli Kyriakidi

Visual designer & Animator

Nefeli is a visual designer at Do Tank, passionate about creating narrative visuals through graphic and motion design. She thrives on the creative journey, embracing each step of the design process with enthusiasm and a keen eye for detail.

Nefeli’s career journey is diverse, including TV project management and supervising Netflix dubbing projects, which led her to specialize in motion design, creative thinking, and audio editing. At Do Tank, she works on varied client projects across industries like CPG, healthcare, tech, and sustainability, crafting innovative visual content for global brands. Proficient in Adobe Creative Suite (After Effects, Illustrator, Premiere, Photoshop), she brings a wealth of expertise to her work.

Originally from Greece, Nefeli holds a BA in History and Philosophy. Driven by a desire to explore design further, she pursued studies in Design and Film in Denmark and completed an MSc in Creative Advertising in the UK. She has been living in Glasgow for the past five years and has also taught motion design at Napier Edinburgh University, sharing her knowledge and passion with students. An avid traveler, Nefeli loves discovering new places and drawing inspiration from different cultures.

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Bruno Suarez Bango

Lead visual designer

Bruno is a Minneapolis-based artist, designer and frustrated drummer from Quito, Ecuador.

Bruno has a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a focus in Printmaking and Visual Communication. As a thinker and creator, he finds himself navigating boundaries and contemplating oppositions:
between the culture he was raised in and the culture he is currently part of, between societal structures and the people within them, and between the processes of art and design.

This explorative and critical mindset carves Bruno’s path both in and out of the studio, and fuels his interests in music, art, design, politics, futbol, and pop culture in general.

Digital Designers

From algorithms to action, our digital team can build your bespoke digital platforms.

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Steve McLaughlin

Partner & Head of Digital

Steve is an experienced Learning Consultant and Designer who is responsible for our growing Business Design Academy.

Steve is passionate about Learning and Development. He is forward thinking about the technology we use to deploy digital learning and firmly believes in helping individuals unlock their full potential.

He supports organizations by helping them develop robust digital learning strategies and foster a creative culture of learning. Steve encourages people to think differently, build capability, adopt change, and personally develop their career.

Steve brings 14 years of experience working in a global corporate Learning and Development environment.

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Dave Findon

Digital designer

Dave is a Digital Designer who works primarily with the new Business Development Academy (BDA)—designing and building our platform for course delivery and assisting in the creation of the courses themselves.

Dave is passionate about all things technology and is fighting his way to the forefront of web and mobile app development. He’s our resident WordPress and LearnDash guru, and he has deep experience with JavaScript, Python and Java. If you have a tech problem, Dave’s your guy.

Dave holds a masters degree in Computing and an undergraduate degree in Environmental Geoscience from Cardiff University.

David Gee

Digital designer

David is a multi-disciplined visual designer & developer, with extensive experience in Content Management Systems.

David is passionate about combining visually rich designs within functional customer-centric UI.

David brings over 20 years experience working in both the public and private sectors delivering creative solutions while ensuring the maximum accessibility, customer experience and usability.

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Paweł Karpiński

Digital designer

Paweł Karpiński is a web developer at Do Tank. He graduated with a Bachelor of Science in web and mobile development from The University of The West of Scotland.

Paweł is a big enthusiast of modern web technologies and aesthetic design. He aspires to create unique and truly immersive web experiences by combining different technologies, techniques and styles.

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Maxim Dascalasu

Digital designer

Maxim is a digital designer at Do Tank, experienced in web development, graphic design, and planning projects in the UK and abroad.

In recent years, he has specialized in the field of software development and frequently involved to produce UI/UX analysis reports on various websites and applications. He has provided project architecture and design patterns reports and object-oriented analysis and design on many creative projects.

He is proficient in the use of all planning and coding software including MS Project, Primavera P6, ASTA Powerproject, Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ, NetBeans, Java Database Connectivity.

His project experience includes planning, coding, testing software projects, developing CI/CD pipelines using Azure platform technologies, developing databases in various contexts, designing mock-ups and prototypes, configuring and administering servers on VMware, writing scripts for automatisation of system components, developing websites in a business environment.

Maxim received his Bachelor of Science in Software Development for Business from the Glasgow Caledonian University at Glasgow.

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Anita Aksentowicz

Digital designer

Anita is a digital designer at Do Tank who specializes in full-stack development.

The projects that she is involved in within the UK and abroad include both CMS and bespoke development. She has experience working with some new, popular technologies such as Laravel, React, Vue, and Svelte. Although JavaScript and PHP are the languages she works the closest with, she also knows her way around C# and Java. She is passionate about finding new, enhancing solutions for UX & UI and she treats web design more as her hobby than her actual job. Her goal is to create a user-friendly, fully responsive, and presentational web experience for all Do Tank clients. She aspires to make her projects include as many unique and bespoke elements as possible. Planning, wireframing, coding, testing, creating guidelines, and documentation are activities that always appear in her daily schedule.

She graduated with a Bachelor of Science in web and mobile development from The University of The West of Scotland. Back in Poland she also graduated from School of Economics in advertisement & marketing.

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