Cheryl Zhenyu Qian is an Assistant Professor of Interaction Design in Industrial Design at Purdue University. She received a B.Arch. from Southeast University in China, M.A.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees of Interactive Arts and Technology from Simon Fraser University in Canada. She seeks to understand design as a cognitive process and to use computers to complement the capabilities of designers in creative and flexible ways. Apart from conducting research on design process, she also worked as an active designer, creating visual representations such as interactive and dynamic websites, 3D renderings and animations, developing multimedia courses to foster design education, analyzing use cases to improve multimedia repository design, and producing information visualization panels to support navigation.

As an academic researcher, apart from winning the 1st demo contest prize of I2LOR'07 and the 2nd demo contest prize of I2LOR'05, Cheryl has built up a publication list ranging from journals, conference proceedings, poster presentations, and book translations in the interdisciplinary domains of Interaction Design, Digital Learning, Computer-aided Design, and Human-computer Interaction. Her PhD dissertation won the Dean of Graduate Studies Convocation Medal from Simon Fraser University in 2010.

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