Lu was named an Outstanding Reviewer of the journal Chemical Society Reviews in 2018 and 2019, featured in a 2018 JACS Young Investigators Virtual Issue, and named a Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow in 2013. She has been honored with invited speaking engagements, as she gave a plenary lecture at a Royal Society of Chemistry Dalton Conference in 2018, and the Association for Cultural Diversity in Chemistry Lecture at the University of Pennsylvania in 2016. In 2017, Lu was invited to be a speaker at the Indo-US Workshop on Organometallic Chemistry and a Inorganic Chemistry Young Outstanding Upcoming speaker at Symposium on Advanced Biological Inorganic Chemistry in Kolkata, India.