Lesa Lorusso, PhD, RID, NCIDQ, Principal, senior vice president, research and insights, Gresham Smith (Orlando, Fla.)

Armed with degrees in interior design, architecture, business, and healthcare design, Lesa Lorusso serves as a firmwide resource at Gresham Smith, using her diverse background to strengthen healthcare planning and design through research and innovation.

She collaborates with the firm’s healthcare team to facilitate human-centered design and development and implementation of research strategy and scalable tools for knowledge-sharing among healthcare planners and designers.

Lorusso’s key roles include identifying opportunities for evidence-based design research, leading strategic implementation of research projects, and developing external collaborative partnerships.

Her research efforts help arm and legitimize the design recommendations of her colleagues.

Specifically, she collaborated with the Veterans Health Administration and the University of Florida, with Gresham Smith as the principal investigator, on a study titled “Sensory Environments for Behavioral Health in Dementia: Diffusion of an Environmental Innovation at the Veterans Health Administration,” investigating the impact of multisensory environments as behavioral therapy for veterans with dementia.

Awarded the Environmental Design Research Association’s Certificate of Research Excellence for this work, she expanded upon the research by disseminating it nationally with organizations such as the VA, American Institute of Architects, and Alzheimer’s Association to bring the research findings directly to the clinicians and design teams shaping environments of care.

She is also studying the impact of architectural design on the sensory experience to reduce patient and caregiver stress for clients including Baptist Healthcare Pensacola, which incorporated therapeutic multisensory environments for pediatric, adult, and geriatric patients.

This work has influenced designs not only for behavioral health but also intensive care units, respite environments for clinic staff, and operating rooms.

Furthermore, she and her team continue to push the boundaries of using technology to study hospital environments to benefit quality of care as well as staff experience. This includes multidisciplinary collaborations with acoustic experts to model and test design impact on sound reverberation in operating rooms.

Additionally, she uses leading-edge wearable technology to track staff movement and stress levels and utilizing artificial intelligence-integrated machine learning for predictive modeling.

Colleagues rely on her to help build successful client relationships, noting that when Lorusso is a part of a project pursuit interview team, the win rate is twice the average of the firm’s market win rate.

Internally, her leadership has also affected the design process at the firm and helped designers see design challenges in a new light.

Specifically, Lorusso and the firm’s research and insights team evaluate evidence-based design decisions using a collaborative framework and a mixed-methods approach to pre- and post-occupancy evaluations, bringing transparency, vision, and clear goals that empower efficient decision making and optimize results.

In her six years with the firm, she’s disseminated her work in more than 50 healthcare-based publications, bringing meaningful evidence-based findings and expertise to colleagues and the industry at large.

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