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

​

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 design stage. 

​

Onan's work has been widely published in 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). 

​

He served on the technical and scientific committees for the Digital Human Modeling and Applications in Health, Safety,
Ergonomics, and Risk Management in HCII (2018 and 2024) and the International Digital Human Modeling Symposium in (2022 and 2023).