Yuan Lu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Industrial Design at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) and has served as Education Director of the Bachelor’s and Master’s programmes since 2021. Her research is positioned at the intersection of systems thinking, human-centered design, and healthcare technology innovation.

Her work focuses on the design, development, and evaluation of technology-enabled interventions that support behaviour change, health promotion, and long-term self-management. Current research topics include personalized behaviour change technologies, multi-stakeholder co-design, virtual agents and conversational interfaces, wearable and sensor-based health monitoring, dietary behaviour assessment, preventive health, cardiovascular care, healthy ageing, and digital health solutions for children and adolescents with chronic health conditions.

Since 2020, she has established extensive interdisciplinary collaborations with Wageningen University & Research (WUR), Utrecht University (UU), University Medical Center Utrecht (UMCU), Máxima Medical Center, Princess Máxima Center, and other partners within the EWUU Alliance. She leads and contributes to nationally and internationally funded projects, including initiatives supported by Horizon 2020, the Dutch Heart Foundation, the Dutch Cancer Society (KWF), NWO, and EWUU Preventive Health. Her research combines design research, engineering, clinical practice, and data science to facilitate the responsible development, adoption, implementation, and evaluation of healthcare technologies in real-world settings.

Over the past decade, she has supervised research on healthy ageing, dementia, cardiovascular health, dietary behaviour, AI-supported health interventions, and patient self-management, resulting in numerous publications in design, HCI, digital health, and interdisciplinary journals and conferences. She currently serves as an Editorial Board Member of BMC Geriatrics and Special Issue Editor of BMC Artificial Intelligence. She regularly reviews for journals and conferences in design, digital health, ageing, and human-computer interaction.

Before she transitioned into healthcare technology and human-centered design, her research focused on quality and reliability engineering, information flow analysis, and customer feedback management in new product development.

Yuan Lu obtained a BEng (1993) and MEng (1995) in Mathematics from Xi’an Jiaotong University, China, and an MEng in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the National University of Singapore (1999). She subsequently completed a joint PhD between Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) and the National University of Singapore in Technology Management (2002), becoming the first doctoral graduate of the joint TU/e-NUS programme.

Before joining academia full-time, she worked as a Research Engineer and Project Manager at the Centre of Robust Design of the National University of Singapore. In 2001, she joined Eindhoven University of Technology as Researcher and Lecturer in the Department of Industrial Engineering and Innovation Sciences. She became Assistant Professor in 2004 and moved to the Department of Industrial Design in 2007, where she was promoted to Associate Professor in 2012.

Alongside her appointment at TU/e, she served as Liaison Associate Professor at the International Design Institute of Zhejiang University (2012-2018), was a visiting Associate Professor at National Taiwan University of Science and Technology in 2016, and has been Guest Professor at the School of Software Technology, Zhejiang University, since 2017.

Her academic career has evolved from quality and reliability engineering and technology management towards human-centered design, systems thinking, digital health, and healthcare innovation, resulting in extensive interdisciplinary collaborations across design, engineering, clinical practice, and public health.

Yuan Lu obtained the University Teaching Qualification (UTQ) in 2012 and has more than two decades of teaching experience at Eindhoven University of Technology. Her educational philosophy combines systems thinking, human-centered design, challenge-based learning, and responsible innovation to prepare students to address complex societal and technological challenges.

She has developed, coordinated, and taught numerous Bachelor’s and Master’s courses across Industrial Design and Industrial Engineering. Among her educational contributions is the co-development of the TU/e USE learning line New Product Development and Marketing together with colleagues from Industrial Engineering and Innovation Sciences. She also initiated and coordinated project-based education activities in the area of healthy ageing, including Studio Silver.

Since 2021, she has served as Education Program Director for both the Bachelor’s and Master’s programmes in Industrial Design. In this role, she has led curriculum innovation and redesign initiatives, contributed to the development of challenge-based and interdisciplinary education, and played a central role in maintaining educational quality and programme accreditation. During her leadership, the Bachelor Industrial Design programme achieved the first position in the Dutch Keuzegids ranking in 2025.

She has supervised more than 90 Bachelor’s and Master’s graduation projects, completed supervision of multiple EngD and PhD candidates, and currently supervises a substantial portfolio of doctoral researchers in collaboration with academic, clinical, and industrial partners. She also serves regularly as examiner and assessment committee member for PhD theses at TU/e and international universities.