Susan F. Lu

Dr. Susan F. Lu is Associate Professor of Management at the Krannert School of Management, Purdue 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.

Dr. Lu has published 20 research papers, many of which appeared in leading management and economics journals such as Science, Review of Economics and Statistics, Management Science 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 2014, she received the Early Career Investigator from the National Institute of Health (NIH-HMORN) conference. 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.

Dr. Lu’s work has gained considerable visibility in the fields of operations management (OM) and economics. 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 applying 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. Recently, her paper which applies machine learning based techniques into empirical research appeared in the NBER Digest and Vox.