Dr. Stephen C-Y. Lu is the permanent holder of the David Packard Endowed Chair Professor in Manufacturing Engineering at the School of Engineering at the USC. He directs the Viterbi iPodia (ViP) global education Program and the Master of Science in Product Development Engineering program at USC. Before joining USC in 1995, he was a tenured, full professor of Mechanical Engineering, Industrial Engineering, and Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), and the founding director of UIUC’s Knowledge-based Engineering Systems Research Laboratory.
He was a visiting professor at MIT, and the Technical University, Berlin, Germany, in 1993, at Shanghai Jiao-tong University in 2001, and at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon, Korea, 2007. Dr. Lu was the Chairman of the Technical Advisory Committee of the SAVE/JAST (Joint Advanced Striking Technology) program at the Lockheed-Martin Company that designed and developed the next generation fighter aircrafts for the U.S. military. He is the Chief Editor of the International Journal of Collaborative Engineering. For his scientific and technical contributions, he has received prestigious recognitions from many national and international organizations, including two Presidential (USA and Germany) awards, six honorary professorships, and one founding Dean honor from foreign universities. Dr. Lu’s current research and teaching interests are in design thinking, collaborative engineering, and technological innovation.
Elisabeth Arnold Weiss is an Associate Professor of Technical Communication Practice in the Viterbi School of Engineering at the University of Southern California. She is the 2019 recipient of the Dean’s Award for Innovation in Teaching and Education. She leads the Improv for Engineers program, a co-curricular partnership between Viterbi and the School for Dramatic Arts and is developing a custom IFE experience in VR through a grant from the Engineering Information Foundation. She has co-chaired the USC Good Neighbors Campaign for Viterbi and serves on the Executive Board of the American Society of Engineering Education- PSW region.
She has been teaching in the Viterbi School since 1999 and previously taught at Harvey Mudd College. She holds degrees from the University of Virginia and Claremont.