A Human Factors Engineer with Decades of Experience
Ed Israelski PhD is a consultant and the recently retired director of Human Factors at AbbVie, a biopharmaceutical company. Ed’s consulting practice focuses on giving strategic advice to medical product clients to ensure compliance with US FDA and international standards to achieve regulatory approval. He joined Abbott Labs/AbbVie in 2001, where he led a cross-company team to imbed best-practice human factors engineering HFE design methods into all of AbbVie’s products, to ensure safety and usability. He did this through hands-on design and evaluation of key new products, building and managing a group of HF professionals; training and mentoring internal resources, writing corporate policy and guidelines and facilitating the use of outside professional HFE resources. For these efforts he was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award from the AbbVie Volwiler Society.
He is the co-convener for IEC and ISO Ergonomic and Usability Engineering groups in developing international Human Factors/Usability medical devices standards. Ed is also past co-chair of the AAMI Human Factors Engineering committee, which develops HF standards for medical devices and is a member of their teaching faculty. He is a certified human factors professional CHFP. He has authored twenty book chapters and numerous articles in the area of human factors. He has co-authored a book, Risk Management: How to Assess and Control Risk Related to Human Error (2022). Ed holds thirty patents. He is a fellow of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society and a past member of the National Academy of Sciences Board on Human-System Integration. He is on the editorial board for the journal Human Factors and serves as a regular reviewer for several other scientific journals.
He has worked as a systems engineer, product manager, market researcher, industrial/organizational psychologist as well as a human factors engineer at various companies including Lucent Technologies - Bell Labs, formerly AT&T (28 years), Ameritech/SBC and Human Factors International, Ed is an adjunct instructor at Northwestern University and previously NJIT and Virginia Tech. He received a B.S. in electrical engineering from NJIT, an M.S. in operations research from Columbia University and a Ph.D. in industrial and engineering psychology from Stevens Institute of Technology.
On a personal level, he and his wife enjoy time with their 2 daughters and 2 grandchildren. They also enjoy boating, fitness activities, travel (visited over 100 countries and all 50 states, click to see) fine dining and reading. A recent hobby has been acting as an extra in TV shows including Chicago Med, Proven Innocent, neXT, Batwoman, Night Sky and Fargo.
Ed repelling down the 27 floor Wit Hotel in Chicago for charity
Ed and his family and friend Leon Gold in Hoboken, NJ
Ed, his wife of 48 years and his two daughters, Christin and Keri Anne
Ed as Extra on the TV show Next
Ed as extra on the TV show Fargo
Ed as Extra on TV Show Chicago Med. Appears as hospital volunteer
After climbing up 103 floors of the Sears Tower in Chicago for Charity
Ed and Wife Linda
Lifetime Achievement Award from the AbbVie Wolwiller Society for institutionalizing Human Factors Engineering at Abbott Labs and AbbVie
TV Extra Appearances
For fun, Ed can also be spotted as a background extra on a few network television shows. Watch him here on Chicago Med. (Season 4, Episode 14) Don’t blink.
Here is Ed as a nursing home client eating dinner in the dining room in a scene with Sissy Spacek in the TV show Night Sky Episode 1. Ed is in front of the rear window just to the right of the wooden column on the left.
Here is a video clip of the same scene.
