Professor Zhun Fan is currently a Full Professor at the Advanced Research Institute, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (Shenzhen). He previously served as Distinguished Professor and Head of the Department of Electronic and Information Engineering at Shantou University, Executive Dean of the Shantou Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Manufacturing, Director of the International Joint Research Center for Evolutionary Intelligence and Robotics, and Director of the Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Digital Signal and Image Processing. He has also held academic positions at the Technical University of Denmark and Michigan State University.
He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Control Engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology and his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Michigan State University in 2004. His research interests include artificial intelligence, robotics, mechatronic design automation, computer vision, evolutionary computation, and machine learning.
Professor Fan has led numerous national and international research projects sponsored by institutions such as the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Ministry of Science and Technology of China, and the Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation. He has developed a wide range of robotic prototypes, including hospital transport robots, intelligent welding systems, mobile manipulators for power plant maintenance, and bionic legged robots.
He has authored or co-authored over 327 academic publications, including more than 128 SCI-indexed journal articles in leading journals such as IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, and IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation. With an h-index of 43, he has been listed in the Top 2% of the World's Scientists by Stanford University from 2021 to 2024, and was further recognized on the Career-Long Impact list in 2024.
He holds over 110 patents (40 granted) and multiple software copyrights. He has served as Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation and Complex & Intelligent Systems, and has been invited to give keynote speeches at major conferences such as WCCI, GECCO, and BIGDIA.
Professor Fan is a Senior Member of IEEE and serves in numerous academic and professional organizations in China, including Vice Chairman of the Guangdong Society of Image and Graphics and executive member of several national committees in robotics and artificial intelligence. His honors include the Science and Technology Progress Award from the China Society of Image and Graphics, the Science Popularization Award from the Chinese Association of Automation, the Innovation Award from the China Industry-University-Research Cooperation Association, and the Chinese Overseas Contribution Award for outstanding work in intelligent mechatronic system design.