As they prepared for the 2016-2017 school year, administrators and teachers at Design Tech High School ("d.tech"), a public charter school in Northern California, decided they needed a deeper understanding of how students learn. According to Nicole Cerra, Director of Learning, "Obviously you need to get to know students academically, but also personally, culturally, and cognitively. We felt we didn't know the adolescent brain well enough." However, the team did not want to simply learn more about the adolescent brain; they wanted to apply this knowledge in concrete ways across their unique curriculum, which is organized around an engineering-based, design thinking process. Students learn how to first understand a problem and end-user, then brainstorm solutions, create prototypes, analyze data, and finally, engage in multiple design iterations. This report shares the story of d.tech's journey, which provides useful ideas for other schools seeking to integrate research into their own culture and context.