A surgeon sits in front of a console, head tucked into a cavity that shows an enhanced view of the operating field, controlling a multipronged robot that’s actually performing—mechanically, at least—the procedure. Studies have shown that robot-assisted surgeries result in smaller incisions, less blood loss, shorter recovery time, and other positive patient outcomes.
But how does this technologically enhanced setup affect the members of the surgical team? How does it impact their behavior and cognitive performance? What about their physical health?
These are the sorts of questions Jackie Cha works to answer.
Cha has brought her work on human-robot interactions in healthcare to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, joining as the Patricia Flatley Brennan Assistant Professor of industrial and systems engineering. She arrives at UW-Madison in fall 2025 as part of the university’s RISE-THRIVE (Research, Innovation and Scholarly Excellence: Transforming Healthspan through Research, InnoVation, and Education) initiative.
Cha spent the previous four and a half years at Clemson University, where she received a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award, along with additional grants from the NSF, the National Institutes of Health and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
In addition to surgical robotic systems, which are increasingly used in general surgery, urology, and gynecology, Cha studies the use of wearable technologies such as exoskeletons and artificial intelligence-based decision support systems. She measures the effects of those technologies through a human factors lens, all aimed at improving performance, efficiency and safety.
“When you have a robot in the operating room, everything right now is mostly controlled by the surgeon or a human operator, but we’re going to get to a point where the control will shift,” she says. “If robots actually do have some level of autonomy and they’re able to do specific tasks, how is that interaction going to change between the actual teammates?”
Cha, who was born in Korea but moved to Michigan at a young age, became interested in human factors engineering as an undergraduate researcher in ergonomics and biomechanics at the University of Michigan. After earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in biomedical engineering at Michigan, she switched to industrial engineering for her PhD at Purdue University.
“I’ve always been interested in the intersection of healthcare and engineering. During grad school, much of my work was in surgery, looking at how technology was also affecting operating rooms, surgeons, the entire surgical team, as well as the patients,” she says. “Being in the operating room for hundreds of hours really exposed me to what was happening in the space and how the technology may actually be aiding, as well as, hindering the work and patient care.”
Cha says she looks forward to collaborating with her new colleagues in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering’s human factors and ergonomics research cluster, bringing a unique perspective on investigating the physical and cognitive demands of emerging technologies. She’s long admired Duane H. and Dorothy M. Bluemke Professor Robert Radwin and remembers participating in a mentor-mentee lunch with Emerson Electric Quality & Productivity Professor John Lee at a Human Factors and Ergonomics Society conference as a student. And she is also excited to work closely with the rest of the group—Douglas Wiegmann, Ranjana Mehta and Tony McDonald—and the rest of the ISyE faculty.
“The human factors group in ISyE at UW is, I believe, one of the strongest,” she says. “And then also, of course, with the strong medical school, this is a really exciting place for the next stage of my career.”
Before starting her faculty career at Clemson, Cha briefly worked as a lead reviewer with the robotic assisted surgery device team at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. She drew on that experience to create a class on human factors and device design and analysis at Clemson, and she plans to develop a similar course at UW-Madison.
“I try to expose the students to real-world applications, either through examples that I’ve seen in the operating room or everyday life,” she says, “and then ask a lot of open-ended questions.”