Biography
Professor Hongnian Yu is Head of Research in the School of Engineering and the Built Environment. He has successfully supervised 20 PhD theses and 18 Master by Research theses, and has examined over 30 PhD/MPhil students’ theses as both internal and external examiner. He has trained 12 post-doctoral research fellows. He has published over 200 journal and conference research papers. He has held several research grants worth about eight million pounds from the UK EPSRC, the Royal Society, and the European, AWM, as well as from industry. He has managed several international large consortiums as a coordinator. Examples are 1) coordinator (PI) of an EPSRC funded £158K international network project on Human Adaptive Mechatronics which includes 7 Japanese partners and 7 UK partners; 2) coordinator of the EU funded 3.05 million Euro Erasmus Mundus FUSION project which has 20 international partners; 3) coordinator of the EU funded one million Euro Marie Curie project, etc.
Prof Yu has strong research collaboration with partners from over 30 countries, such as China, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Italy, Japan, Romania, Thailand, and UK. He was awarded the F.C. William Premium for his paper on adaptive and robust control of robot manipulators by the IEE Council, and has received two best conference paper awards, seven best (student) conference paper awards with his research students. He has won the Gold Medal on The World Exhibition on Inventions, Research and New Technologies, INNOVA 2009, Brussels, and International Exhibition of Inventions, Geneva, Switzerland, 2010, for invention “Method and device for driving mobile inertial robots”; and the 43rd International Exhibition of inventions, New Techniques and Products, in Geneva, 2015. He is a member of the EPSRC Peer Review College, Fellow of the IeT, Fellow of the RSA, and senior member of IEEE.
Prof Yu is multi-disciplinarily educated and has a divergent knowledge base, good communication and teaching skills.He is enjoying working with people, eager to learn, hardworking and conscientious with considerable initiative. His research covers the following three areas:
1) Robotics and intelligent control.
2) Applied Artificial intelligence, data analysis, data sciences with applications in digital healthcare and manufacturing systems
3) Applications of emerging technology, such as RFID, wireless technology, etc into the health care, manufacturing systems.