Alexis Palá ‘15

This bio is current as of 2022.

Alexis Palá is currently a Research Associate of Public Services and Social Innovation at Y Lab of Cardiff University, Wales, UK. She is passionate about better policy by design and more participatory, inclusive forms of decision making. She uses design approaches and facilitation techniques to visualise new pathways forward. 

Projects include: exploring how Community Legal Empowerment can help close the justice gap in Lesotho and beyond; Barts Shielders: psychologically-safe spaces for peer-support and collaborative problem solving in the National Health Service during the Covid-19 pandemic; understanding the spread of innovation and good practice in Wales (barriers and enables); building a public service pioneers community in the UK; supporting public servants in the UK to wade into complexity by problem framing, not problem defining, in public services.

Since graduating from Notre Dame, Alexis supported a L’Arche Community for adults with intellectual disabilities in Querétaro, Mexico, served as a US Fulbright Scholar in Chile, and completed an MPhil in Public Policy at Cambridge University with a work placement at the Australian Centre for Social Innovation (TACSI). In addition to her work through Y Lab, she is a Behavioural Health Designer with Somni, a company striving to solve people’s deepest sleep needs.