Wei Chen (engineer)

Wei Chen is a Chinese-American mechanical engineer known for her work on robust engineering design, robust design of experiments, metamodeling in design, uncertainty quantification, and design under uncertainty.^[1] She is the Wilson-Cook Professor in Engineering Design at Northwestern University, where she chairs the mechanical engineering department.^[2]

Education and career

Chen earned a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, a master's degree from the University of Houston, and a Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology,^[3] completed in 1995.^[4] She joined the Northwestern University faculty in 2003.^[2]

She is the editor-in-chief of the ASME Journal of Mechanical Design and president of the International Society for Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization.^[3] She became chair of mechanical engineering at Northwestern in 2020.^[2]

Book

Chen is the coauthor with Christopher Hoyle and Henk Jan Wassenaar of the book Decision-based Design: Integrating Consumer Preferences into Engineering Design (Springer, 2012). She is also a co-editor of several edited volumes.^[5]

Recognition

Chen was the 2006 winner of the Ralph R. Teetor Educational Award of SAE International. She was named a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 2009,^[3] and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2019 "for contributions to design under uncertainty in products and systems, and leadership in the engineering design community".^[4][6]