Susan Lu
Gerald Lyles Rising Star Professor of Management
Education
Ph.D., Northwestern University (MEDS)
M. A., Beijing University, China
B. A., Beijing University, China
Dr. Susan F. Lu is the Gerald Lyles Rising Star Professor of Management at the Mitchell E. Daniels, Jr. School of Business, Purdue University. She received her PhD from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. She is also an affiliated faculty of healthcare engineering at the Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering.
Her research centers on healthcare operations and analytics, with an emphasis on nursing home operations and cardiac care delivery. Applying both empirical and machine learning methodologies, she investigates the operational drivers of healthcare delivery performance to understand the impact of public policies and technological innovations on the management of healthcare operations. She is also specialized in supply chain management and research on innovation and entrepreneurship.
Dr. Lu has completed 35 research papers, with 32 being published and 3 being under review/revision. Many of these papers appeared in leading management and economics journals such as Science, Management Science, MSOM, Information System Research, POMS, Review of Economics and Statistics and Journal of Health Economics. She received the best paper award from the ASHE in 2008, which is one of the most prestigious awards in the community of health economists and is given to a single-authored paper every other year. In 2015, her paper about health IT received the WHITE best paper award, the most prestigious award in the field of health IT. In 2016, her paper about mandatory overtime laws was a finalist for the Pierskalla award by INFORMS Health Applications Society. In 2018, her work on treatments of heart attack was selected as a Best Abstract of the CRT 2018 Cardiovascular Research Technology Conference, which is one of the world's leading interventional cardiology conferences and is attended by more than 3,000 doctors. In 2019, her paper on telemedicine won the best paper award in the Hawaii International Conference on System Science.
Dr. Lu's work has gained considerable attention in the public. One of her work was selected by Nature News for annual important discoveries in 2013. One work collaborating with a group of interdisciplinary researchers has been endorsed by the world-known blog Freakonomics. One work combining operations management into policy analysis is recommended by a healthcare media Healthcare Value Hub. Another work on solving shortage of donated blood is recognized by the Nobel Prize Laureate Al Roth's blog - Market Designer. Her paper which applies machine learning based techniques into empirical research appeared in the NBER Digest and Vox. During the COVID-19 period, her work about legal issues on nursing home negligence appeared at Barron's. In May 2023, she provided her expert testimony on elderly care to the US Senate Special Committe of Aging.
Currently she is an associate editor of Management Science, an associate editor of MSOM, a senior editor of Production and Operations Management Journal (POMS) and an associate editor of Naval Research Logistics (NRL). Beyond academia, she is a mentor for the Creative Destruction Lab and an academic advisor for the Brattle Group.