Prof Da-Wei Gu was born in Shanghai, China. He graduated from Department of Mathematics, Fudan University, Shanghai, China, in 1979, and received the M.Sc. degree in applied mathematics from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, in 1981, and the Ph.D. degree in control system theory from Department of Electrical Engineering, Imperial College of Science and Technology, London, U.K., in 1985.
During 1981-1982, he was a lecturer in Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He was a postdoctoral research assistant in Department of Engineering Science, Oxford University, U.K., from 1985 to 1989. In 1989, he was appointed to a University Lectureship in Department of Engineering at Leicester University, UK, and subsequently promoted to a senior lecturer, reader and professor.
Da-Wei Gu's research interests include robust control, optimal control, optimization algorithms, fault detection and computer-aided control systems design. He has contributed to the theoretical development of H_inf optimization, super H_inf optimization solutions, low-order controller design, mixed optimisation in control, strong stabilisation methods, etc. He is particularly interested in combining sophisticated numerical optimization techniques, including semi-infinite optimisation, neural network techniques, genetic algorithms and simulated annealing algorithms in robust control systems design in order to meet more practical, multiple design objectives. In the last few years, he has been focusing on theoretical developments and their applications to problems of interest to industry. His research includes using expert system environments to aid systems design, developing sophisticated numerical optimisation algorithms in the optimal scheduling for production processes, and employing hybrid systems in autonomous UAV mission allocation and flight path selection. His research on fault tolerant control and perturbation analysis of control algorithms is directed at the successful design and safe operation of industrial processes. Recently he has been engaged in the research in the areas of medical engineering and system biology on topics such as cancer tissue modelling, medicine dispersion modelling and data/image processing. His research results have been well received by the international community. Since 2003, he has received considerable funding for my research, as principal investigator or co-investigator, from EPSRC, Government and Industry (in excess of £3M). He has been a consultant for Cambridge Control Ltd and Matra Marconi Space, Toulouse, and is currently a consultant on a Lachesis funded project on breast cancer diagnostics using electrical impedance mammography technology. Over the years, Professor Gu Has published more than 160 refereed papers and two books. He is a recognised expert in the development of reliable computational methods for control systems design. He is a co-author of Stable-H, the first commercially available software for H_inf control systems design and a co-author of Slicot, a numerically reliable software package for control systems identification and design. Subroutines of this package have been widely used by control systems design engineers and researchers. Some of the routines have been adopted in MATLAB, one of the most widely used packages in science and engineering. He is also a founder member of NICONET, the EU network for reliable software for control engineering. He is a Chartered Engineer.