Onan received his Ph.D. in the School of Industrial Engineering at Purdue University, where he also completed his B.S. and M.S. degrees. He joined the School of Mechanical, Industrial, and Manufacturing Engineering at Oregon State University in 2016. He is currently an Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering and a Principal Investigator (PI) at the Design Engineering Lab, the largest academic mechanical engineering design research lab in the US. 

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His Ph.D. dissertation established a modular approach to human-centered design by integrating computational and experimental human factors design methods and emerging technologies. The framework enables designers to inject human factors into concept modeling and evaluation during the early-phase design. 

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Onan's research focuses on synthesizing theory, principles, methods, and technologies to create and cultivate multi-disciplinary human-centered design theory and methods. His work has been published in many refereed journals and conferences, including the Journal of Mechanical Design (JMD), the International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction (IJHCI), the Journal of Computing and Information Science in Engineering (JCISE), the International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (IDETC), and Human-Computer Interaction International (HCII).