Biography
Dr Wei Liu is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) 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 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).
Wei has rich experience in conducting interdisciplinary research and has obtained over £2.8 million in research grants from EPSRC, NIHR, NSFC and other prestigious funding bodies. She is also a recipient of the Best Paper Award from the Product Development and Management Association (PDMA) Conference and British Academy of Management (BAM) Conference. Wei's research outputs have been published in the leading design, advanced manufacturing and innovation management journals including The Design Journal, Design Science, Rapid Prototyping Journal, 3D printing and Additive Manufacturing, R&D Management, California Management Review, and Sustainable Production and Consumption. Wei is the Co-Editor of The Design Journal, the official journal of the European Academy of Design (EAD)
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).
Research interests
- Design thinking & user-centered design
- Design and engineering education
- Design for sustainability (circular economy)
- Design management and entrepreneurship
- Design for advanced manufacturing
- Human-computer interaction
- Design-driven innovation
- New product design & development management
- Innovation ecosystems