Q.-C. Zhong (QCZ, Principal Investigator) received his first Ph.D. degree in Control Theory and Engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China in 1999 and his second Ph.D. degree in Control and Power Engineering from Imperial College London, UK in 2004 with the Best Doctoral Thesis Prize. He had started working in the area of control engineering in 1990. He had held a postdoctoral position at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology from 2000 to 2001 and then a Research Associate position at Imperial College London from 2001 till the end of 2003. He took up a Senior Lectureship at the School of Electronics, University of Glamorgan, UK at the beginning of 2004 and was subsequently promoted to Reader in May 2005. Dr Zhong is currently a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Electronics, the University of Liverpool. His research focuses on H-infinity control of time-delay systems, control in power electronics, process control, control in communication networks and control using delay elements such as input-shaping technique and repetitive control. He is currently holding a £126k grant “Control and Stability Analysis of Time-Delay Systems” awarded by EPSRC. Dr Zhong authored the monograph Robust Control of Time-Delay Systems published by Springer-Verlag Ltd. and produced 22 journal papers in English, half of which were published in the top two international journals in systems and control: IEEE Trans. Automatic Control and Automatica. He serves on the Technical Committee 2.2 (Linear Control Systems) of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) and has been on the International Program Committees of several international conferences. He has established a collaborative network with international leading experts from USA, France, Brazil etc. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE and a Member of the IET.

A . C. Zolotas (ACZ, Co-Investigator) received the BEng (Hons) degree in Electronic and Communications Engineering from the University of Leeds in 1998 and the PhD degree from Loughborough University in 2002. Between January 2002 and August 2003 he was a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Control and Power Group, Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London. He joined Loughborough University as a lecturer in Control Systems Engineering in October 2003. Dr Zolotas’ university research experience has focused upon robust multivariable control and control applications in railway systems and power system networks. His work in the area of robust control concentrated on the adaptation of Quantitative Feedback Theory (QFT) in designing structured and optimal control algorithms. His PhD research work on Advanced Control of Tilting Trains, involved the design of novel local/vehicle control strategies for improved tilt performance. He has made substantial contributions to the practicalities of estimation, optimal and robust control in the design of tilt controllers. During his Post-Doctoral appointment he participated in a research project on Robust Control and Model Reduction for Power Systems funded both by EPSRC (GR/R31676/01) and ABB Ltd. The aim was to improve the inter-area transient system response in the presence of line faults, and he was involved in model approximation techniques and design of practical robust control algorithms. He has now extended his research interests in the area of model reduction and robust control for complex dynamical systems. He is currently holding an £198k EPSRC grant "Optimised Configuration of Sensing Elements for Control and Fault Tolerance" and an EPSRC- CASE for new Academics project "The Architecture and Control of Large Power Networks with Distributed Generation" (CASE/CNA/04/63) jointly supported by ALSTOM Power Conversion Ltd, and in collaboration with the Centre for Renewable Energy Systems Technology (CREST) at Loughborough. He supervises a major part of the activity in the Systems and Control Research Group and works towards strengthening and maintaining the international research excellence of the group in the advanced control of complex dynamical systems. He is an invited lecturer for the MSc programme of the Mathematics Department of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. He has published work in various international conferences and international journals. He serves on the Technical Committee 2.5 (Robust Control) of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC). He is a Member of the IEEE and a Member of the IET.

D. Coca (DC, Project Partner) is a lecturer in the Dept. of ACSE, the Univ. of Sheffield. Before joining the department in June 2004 he was a lecturer in the Dept of Electrical Engineering and Electronics at the University of Liverpool from August 2002. His main areas of research are concerned with the identification and control of nonlinear spatio-temporal systems analysis and simulation of complex systems, modelling and analysis of space weather, re-configurable computing and signal processing of proteomic data. Dr. Coca works closely with the Neuro Imaging Group in the Department of Psychology at Sheffield on the analysis, modelling and identification of brain activity using neuro-imaging techniques. The studies involved signals from various sources including optical image spectroscopy, laser Doppler flow and electrophysiological recording using silicon multi-electrode probes. Recently he has started collaborations with researchers in the Centre for Stem Cell Biology and Neuroscience Research group in the Department of Biomedical Science at Sheffield University on mathematical modelling of ES cell colonies and on neural processing in the visual system. He is currently collaborating with Prof. Beynon (Liverpool) in a BBSRC funded project on high-throughput protein identification and is the principal investigator in an EPSRC funded grant to develop adaptive control methodologies for spatio-temporal systems. Dr. Coca is co-investigator on three other EPSRC grants: “System Identification & Signal Processing for Complex Systems”, “System Identification and Signal Processing for Neuro Imaging Data Analysis” and “System Identification and Model Validation for Spatio-Temporal Dynamical Systems”.

S Evangelou(SE, Project Partner) did the engineering tripos at Cambridge University. He completed his PhD degree at Imperial College and then continued as a Research Associate in the Control and Power Group in the Department of Electrical ans Electronic Engineering at Imperial College London.  He was recently appointed as a Lecturer jointly in the Departments of Electrical and Electronics Engineering and Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College London.  His research interests include the modelling and control of single-track vehicles and the application of control theory to mechanical systems.  He has made several important contributions to knowledge in the area of motorcycle dynamics and has co-authored a number of papers in this area.  The applicant's reasearch on motorcycle dynamics involves computer modelling as well as experimental measurement.   These models have been used to examine the stability properties of motorcycles under various operating conditions and the conclusions have been found to match observed behaviour and to explain a number of stability related accident phenomena.  Dr Evangelou's latest results, which also exploit the advanced models he developed, have examined the possibility of using steering compensators to improve the stability and handling properties of two-wheeled road vevicles.  The current findings show that there is a great advantage for employing steering compensators.  Discussions with the Italian company Ducati are already taking place to develop steering compensators for their motorcycles.  Software, reports, photographs and publications connected with Dr Evangelou's work are available at http://www.imperial.ac.uk/controlandpower/motorcycles.  The applicant's motorcycle modelling work has already been used as the basis for a general-purpose modelling package called 'BikeSim'.  Further details are available at http://www.carsim.com/new/bikesim.html. In addition, his research has been used as the basis of a motorcycle demonstration modelling exercise in MATLAB's toolbox SimMechanics.

K . Li (KL, Project Partner) received PhD degree on control theory and applications from Shanghai Jiaotong University in 1995. He had various research experiences at Shanghai Jiaotong University (1995-1996), Delft University of Technology (1997), and Queen’s University Belfast (1998-2002) before he was appointed lectureship in intelligent systems and control at Queen’s in 2002. Dr Li’s research interests cover theoretic study and engineering application of non-linear system modelling and identification, neural networks, genetic algorithms, process control, and human supervisory control (http://www.ee.qub.ac.uk/control/). Dr Li has produced over ninety publications in the above areas. Dr Li is the principal investigator or co-investigator of several recent projects, including EPSRC grant “Eng-genes - a new genetic modelling approach for real-time operation and control of engineering systems” (2004-2007); highlighted in EPSRC Newsline, issue 29, page 4, 2004; EPSRC grant “INTERACT: Establishing New Research Links with Chinese Universities and Chinese Academy of Science” (2005-2006); and KTP project, with Seagate Technology Media (Ireland) (2005-2007). Dr Li serves in the editorial board of the Transactions of the Institute of Measurement & Control, and Neurocomputing, and has been a guest editor or co-guest editor of several special issues on intelligent computing in a few international journals. Dr Li also holds visiting professorship in Polytechnic University of Bari, Italy, and Shanghai University, China, and he is a chartered Engineer and a member of IEEE and InstMC.

Christian Matthews received his M.Eng degree in Mechanical Systems & Design Engineering from the University of Liverpool, UK in 2003. He subsequently joined the Powertrain Control Group for three years where his research interests were system identification and robust control methodologies applied to powertrain systems and transient dynamometers. He received his Ph.D in December 2007 for his thesis entitled ‘Identification and Robust Control of Automotive Dynamometers’.

In November 2006, he joined add2 ltd where he is a Systems and Control Engineer specialising in HIL (Hardware-In-the-Loop) and RCP (Rapid Control Prototyping) techniques for development and validation of vehicle control systems. His other professional interests include systems modelling and real-time simulation. He is actively involved in a joint research project between add2, The University of Warwick, QinetiQ and Jaguar/Land Rover entitled EVoCS (Evolutionary Validation of Complex Systems). He is also involved in collaboration with a number of University research group’s in the UK.

Dr. Hong Yue is a lecturer at the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, University of Strathclyde. Before taking this position in 2007, she was with Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre from 2005 to 2007 as a research assistant, and University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology from 2001 to 2004. She is also a professor affiliated with the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Dr. Yue’s research interests include modelling and analysis of biological networks, process modelling and advanced control of industrial processes, and output shaping control of molecular weight distribution systems, etc. Her recent interest in systems biology is to integrate mathematical modelling and engineering analysis methods into quantitative investigation of complex dynamic behavior of gene regulatory systems. Dr. Yue serves as IFAC Technical Committee member in Chemical Process Control (TC6.1), and also in Biosystems and Bioprocesses (TC8.4), IEEE senior member, Editorial Board member of “Control and Instruments in Chemical Industry”, steering committee member of NEW-ACE in UK, steering group member of Scottish Biosystem Modelling Network, standing committee member of Chinese Life Scientists Society in UK, etc. She’s the program chair for SIWN International Conference on Bioinformatics and Systems Biology 2010, and the scientific program committee member for the 11th International Conference of Systems Biology (ICSB2010). Dr. Yue is the principal investigator for EPSRC DTG project “Understanding Oscillatory Biological Systems with Engineering Analysis Methods”, Chinese NSFC Project “Modelling and System Analysis of Signal Transduction Pathway Networks”, EPSRC Workshop on Hybrid and Predictive Control for Nonlinear Industrial Applications, and University of Strathclyde BTG Sandpit funds “Stochastic Modelling and Analysis of Genetic Regulatory Systems”