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The Reed College of Media and College of Creative Arts will merge to form the new WVU College of Creative Arts and Media as of July 1, 2024. Get details.

Kristi Hansen Onkka

Healthcare Marketing Consultant, Educator and Speaker

An innovator of online digital experiences for both HCP and consumer/patient with more than 19 years of marketing experience.

Kristi has developed comprehensive and thought-provoking workshops and seminars for her biotechnology clients. Always a forward-thinker, these presentations have inspired discussion around the new potential for audience engagement in Social Media, Virtual and Augmented Reality, Mobile Marketing, Big Data/Predictalytics, Immersive 3D and Autonomous Driving Cars. In addition to her entrepreneurial endeavors, she is currently an adjunct instructor at West Virginia University in the Reed College of Media in the Integrated Marketing Communication master degree program where she is developing a course entitled IMC-693A Augmented and Virtual Reality in IMC. She has also taught IMC-641 Social Media and Marketing.

In October 2016, she launched healthiAR.com. healthiAR is a passion project developed to connect VR/AR/MR developers with the healthcare community. It features examples of virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality applications in patient empathy, clinical utility, treatment, education and training.

She is an educator and early adopter of several emerging platforms: first as part of the Google GLASS explorer program and then as part of the Oculus Rift Developer program. She was a guest speaker, leading a session called “The Next Marketing Edge: Virtual Reality” at Integrate 2016, an integrated marketing communications conference held annually at West Virginia University. She is also featured in the book, The Fourth Transformation: How Augmented Reality and Artificial Intelligence Will Change Everything by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel.

Formerly, she was the Senior Vice-President, Director of Media and Engagement for precisioneffect, a full-service marketing and advertising agency. During her 19 years of agency tenure, she has helped companies launch products and programs focused in the medical device, diagnostic and specialty pharmaceutical space. Her arsenal of successful campaigns range from hyper-targeted online media buys to full content marketing and social experiments.

Kristi Hansen holds a M.S. in Integrated Marketing Communications from West Virginia University and a B.S. in Graphic Design from Woodbury University.



Professor Hansen did an amazing job responding to our initial discussion board posts, asking questions and commenting on our ideas in ways that would move the conversation along. Each week Professor Hansen would create a summary of quotes that she pulled form each one of our posts, using them to highlight how each of us showed out comprehension for the lessons. These summaries were my favorite part of the course, without a doubt! I wish more professors did this for all of my IMC courses.

Above any instruction I have yet taken. She is highly knowledgeable of healthcare and interacts with every student. Absolutely the best.