Elizabeth Johnson, Ph.D., MS-CRM, RN, assistant professor, Mark and Robyn Jones College of Nursing, Montana State University (Bozeman, Mont.)
As an assistant professor at Montana State University’s Mark & Robyn Jones College of Nursing, Elizabeth Johnson stands apart as a leading educator advancing clinicians’ understanding of the physical environment.
Her approach focuses on expanding healthcare design education for nurses and other frontline professionals to prepare them to participate confidently in design processes, helping elevate clinical voices from passive stakeholder input to active co-design leadership.
At the university, she advances interdisciplinary studios and community-embedded research initiatives that bring clinicians, designers, and community partners together to address real healthcare challenges. These projects train participants to articulate clinical needs, test spatial concepts, and collaborate across professional boundaries.
In one project at a critical access hospital in rural Montana, Johnson worked with the Center for American Indian and Rural Health Excellence (CAIRHE) to study whether features such as virtual windows, skylights, and green walls could reduce stress and support wellness in resource-constrained care environments.
By strengthening clinicians’ design literacy and confidence, she improves the quality of early project problem definition—when decisions about workflow, safety, and patient experience have the greatest long-term impact. As a result, clinical realities are more consistently translated into clear, usable design criteria, supporting safer layouts, smoother operations, and better experiences for patients, families, and staff. This interprofessional design process also elevates nursing perspectives and helps teams surface pain points, map workflows, and prioritize safety and dignity in ways designers and engineers can implement.
A major focus of her work also includes leading and advising design charrettes, including the American College Health Association (ACHA) Rebecca Lewis Student Design Competition. There, she helped develop a concept for a critical access hospital that ensured rural and Indigenous community input informs an authentic, culturally aligned design approach from the project start.
Johnson extends learning to broader audiences through hands-on workshops and public-facing education. One example is “The Kind Room,” an art-based activity and storybook that guides rural and Indigenous children to design their own healthcare spaces that make them feel calm and safe. She also hosts Designing Care On-Air, a publicly accessible, design-focused podcast series that connects students, clinicians, and industry professionals.
Throughout her work both in and outside the classroom, Johnson is helping shift the culture of healthcare design toward more consistent, clinician-inclusive collaboration that improves both care delivery and the environments that support it.
Click here to read more about the 2026 HCD 10 winners.
