Cheryl Zhenyu Qian

Promoted to Professor
Rueff School of Design, Art, and Performance
qianz@purdue.edu

Cheryl Zhenyu Qian teaches interaction design and industrial design. She completed a B.Arch at Southeast University in China and an M.A.Sc. and PhD in Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University in Canada. Qian is interested in studying and developing cognitive interactive systems to enrich knowledge, employing interdisciplinary research methodologies to improve design quality and adopting innovative technologies to better accommodate user experience.

Her research focuses on the harmonious integration of physical and virtual interactions in the user experience design; adopting interaction design theories, tools, and evaluation methods to review, compare, guide, and enhance product design outcomes; and employing innovative design thinking into the domain of visual analytics. In addition to winning 14 IEEE VAST challenge system design awards, the first demo contest prize of I2LOR’07 and the second demo contest prize of I2LOR’05, Qian has built a list of more than 80 publications, including journals, conference proceedings, poster presentations, and book translations in the interdisciplinary domains of interaction design, digital learning, computer-aided design, human-computer interaction, and engineering education.

Qian developed Purdue’s Interaction Design MFA program and its four core courses based on the perspectives of interdisciplinary methods and innovative design processes. She initiated frequent undergraduate and graduate student participation in collaboration with other programs on campus and with other universities in community service, special education and game design. Students have successfully procured positions with companies such as Amazon, Google, eBay, Facebook, Samsung, Whirlpool, GE Appliances, Electronic Arts, NASA, Esri, and Motorola.