From 2004 to 2009 he was an assistant and associate professor of biological engineering at Purdue University at West Lafayette. He obtained his academic degrees from Peking University and from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and received post-doctoral training at Cornell University. His research has been focused on Microfluidic devices for single cell analysis and tissue engineering. Professor Lu has received a number of awards, including the NSF Career Award and the Wallace H. Coulter foundation Early Career Award in Biomedical Engineering. See less