As a postdoctoral fellow in DesignLab, Mengting Zhao has been working in DesignLab for more than five years where she published several papers and contributed to projects in collaboration with the industry and other research teams. Her current research focuses on the EEG-based quantification of cognitive states and the recognition of different behavioural patterns when people are performing complex cognitive activities. She proposed a task-related framework (denoted as “tEEG framework”) for identifying designers’ cognitive and affective states from EEG signals, which was built upon her pilot studies and previous research from DesignLab. This framework has been successfully applied within and beyond the context of design to identify human participants’ cognitive control and workload variations from their EEG data. Those applications indicated that the loosely controlled experiments proposed in the framework could be well supported by EEG microstate analysis, which appears to be an effective approach to facilitating ecologically valid neurocognitive studies.