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]
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]
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]
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]