Professor Wei Liu

Professor Wei Liu is a Professor of Design Engineering and Innovation at King's College London with extensive teaching, research and leadership experience across design, engineering and management.

Wei completed her PhD at the University of Cambridge and was Visiting Fellow at Harvard University where she explored design education in interdisciplinary fields. Before joining King’s, Wei conducted academic research and teaching in the UK, US and China. She worked as a faculty member at Cambridge Judge Business School as well as practised leadership as Assistant Dean at Tongji University and Director of Design Research Group and Programme Director at Aston University. Wei is the founding director of several interdisciplinary degree programmes such as MSci Design, Enterprise and Innovation, the first UK-based degree programme of its kind to teach Engineering, Design and Business to trigger students' creativity and entrepreneurship for solving real-world problems. She has won many Academic Awards for Teaching Excellency, and is recognised as a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (SFHEA) in the UK. In 2021, she was elected as the Director and Executive Board Member of Design in Engineering Education Division, American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE). In 2022, she was the only nominee towards the excellency category of ‘Innovation in Teaching’ to represent the faculty. The students under her supervision have won globally top recognitions, e.g. ‘Overall Winner of DMI Essay Competition’, ‘Grand Prize Winner of international Tech Entrepreneurship Competition’, NYJ ‘Top 30 Woman Leader’ and ’Schwarzman Scholarship’.

Wei has rich experience of conducting interdisciplinary research and obtained over £6.3 million research grants from EPSRC, NIHR, NSFC and other prestigious funding bodies. Her research outputs have been successfully filed two invention patents, and have been published in the leading Design, Advanced Manufacturing and Innovation Management journals such as The Design Journal, Design Science, Rapid Prototyping Journal, 3D printing and Additive Manufacturing, Sustainable Production and Consumption, California Management Review and R&D Management. Her paper has been recognised as one of the Top Cited and Most Download papers of the year by Wiley. She won Best Paper Awards from Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) Conference and British Academy of Management (BAM) Conference. She has been awarded the ‘N.E.J. Stevenson Award for Outstanding Contribution to Research’ by the Design and Technology Association.

Wei also has professional design experience in world-leading business and design consultancies (BCG, IBM and TEAMS Design), where she led the design and development of consumer goods, industrial products and digital products for global top brands. Many of her designed products have been produced and sold in the market. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (FRSA).

Wei is Co-Editor of The Design Journal, the official journal of the European Academy of Design (EAD) and one of the top journals in global design research area. She is the full member of EPSRC Review College and an international reviewer for Austrian Science Fund. She has also served as external examiner and judge panel member for different international events, such as degree programme review, international design competitions and academic promotion. Moreover, she has been the session chair, keynote speaker, conference committee member, and scientific review committee member for many international conferences.

Dr Liu is currently accepting PhDs and visiting Scholars, please send your CV via email to wei.liu@kcl.ac.uk 

Research interests

• Design Thinking, User-Centred Design, Human-Computer Interaction
• Design for Healthcare, Design for Aging Society
• Design for Sustainability, Circular Economy
• Design for Advanced Manufacturing, Mechanical Design, Design Engineering
• Design and Innovation Management, Innovation Ecosystems
• Product Design, New Product Development Management
• Design Education, Engineering Education, Innovation Education