Cristina F. Guzmán

Areas of Specialty

New Product Design, Container Design, Package Design, Product and Distribution, Container Logistics, Design Methodologies, and Sustainable Design.

Education

Ph.D. in Packaging, Michigan State University.
Master’s degree in Industrial Design, Materials and Processes, Universidad Autónoma de México.
Undergraduate degree in Industrial Design, Universidad de Monterrey.

Biography

At UDEM, Dr. Guzmán teaches the courses Introduction to Packages and Packaging, Commercial Container Design, Package Design, and Product and Distribution. Additionally, she has taught courses on design from the third to the eighth semester. She has directed more than 25 final projects at the undergraduate level, 2 at the master’s degree level, and 1 at the doctoral level.

She has specialized in the research and development of new products, both at the academic and industrial levels. She has worked in academia for 25 years. For the first eight years she worked at UNAM, where she founded the UDEM Enterprisers Program (Architecture, Business, and Engineering), representing the Center for Research on Industrial Design, where she taught the workshop Enterprisers I and II until 1999.

Her specialty in packaging has represented a strategic area for the Universidad de Monterrey. This led her to study for a Doctoral degree focused on market logistic and perception. Her doctoral thesis was Differences in the Perception of Pallet Systems between US and Canadian Grocery Retailers. She became the first woman with a PHD in Packaging in Mexico, through a CONACyT scholarship. She has obtained various study and research scholarships.  

In 2012, she published the book 7 PASOS PARA EL DESARROLLO Y/O EVALUACIÓN DE ENVASES, Diseño, Optimización y Pruebas (7 Steps for the development and/or assessment of containers, design, optimization and tests). In it, she writes of the history of containers in Mexico, their importance for the development of the country and the main considerations for the development of containers. She has had national and international publications and she is part of three international editorial council. She has one registered patent and two more are in process.  

She maintains that the product-container partnership must be considered from the birth of the idea for the product. This paradigm is the inspiration for the new DAAD Master’s degree program, the Master in Product and Package Design, which started in August 2017.

She was the director of the undergraduate degree program in Industrial Design from 2013 to 2015, supporting the growth and accreditation of the LDI program. By the same token, she developed and launched the program in Sustainable Innovation and Energy Engineering, thus diversifying the department’s profile.