Dr. Yao received his Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley in February 1996 after obtaining the M.Eng. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, in 1992, and the B.Eng. in Applied Mechanics from the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, P.R.China, in 1987. Since 1996, he has been with the School of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University, where he was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor in 2002 and Professor in 2007. He is honored as a Kuang-piu Professor at the Zhejiang University in China as well.
Dr. Yao was awarded a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 1998 and a Joint Research Fund for Outstanding Overseas Chinese Young Scholars from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) in 2005. His research interests include the design and control of intelligent high performance coordinated control of electro-mechanical/hydraulic systems, optimal adaptive and robust control, nonlinear observer design and neural networks for virtual sensing, modeling, fault detection, diagnostics, and adaptive fault-tolerant control, and data fusion. He has published significantly on the subjects with well over 150 technical papers while enjoying the application of the theory through industrial consulting. He is the recipient of the O. Hugo Schuck Best Paper (Theory) Award from the American Automatic Control Council in 2004 and the Outstanding Young Investigator Award of the ASME Dynamic Systems and Control Division (DSCD) in 2007. He is a member of ASME and IEEE and has chaired numerous sessions and served in a number of International Program Committee of various IEEE, ASME, and IFAC conferences. From 2000 to 2002, he was the Chair of the Adaptive and Optimal Control Panel and, from 2001 to 2003, the Chair of the Fluid Control Panel of the ASME Dynamic Systems and Control Division (DSCD). He is currently the Vice-Chair of the ASME DSCD Mechatronics Technical Committee, which he initiated in 2005. He was a Technical Editor of the IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics from 2001 to 2005, and has been an Associate Editor of the ASME Journal of Dynamic Systems, Measurement, and Control since 2006. See https://engineering.purdue.edu/~byao for details. |
