Jingshan Li is an assistant professor of Electrical Engineering and the UK Center for Manufacturing. He is the director of Production and Service Systems Lab. He received his Bachelor degree from Department of Automation, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China in 1989, Master degree from Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China in 1992, and PhD from Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 2000. From 2000-2006, he worked in the Manufacturing Systems Research Lab, General Motors Research & Development Center, Warren, MI. He joined the University of Kentucky in 2006 as a joint faculty member in Electrical Engineering and the Center for Manufacturing.

His research area is in system and control with applications to manufacturing and service systems modeling, analysis, control, lean system design, and supply chain management, etc. Dr. Li is the co-author of the textbook Production Systems Engineering published in 2008, and he has more than 50 referred journal and conference publications. He is a senior member of the IEEE and IIE. He is currently Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, and has served as associate editor for Mathematical Problems in Engineering, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation and IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering. He received 2005 IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering Best Paper Award, and 2006 IEEE Early Industry/Government Career Award in Robotics and Automation. He is also in the finalist of Best Automation Paper Award in 2005 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

Semyon M. Meerkov received the M.S.E.E. degree from the Polytechnic of Kharkov, Kharkov, Ukraine, in 1962 and the Ph.D. degree in systems science from the Institute of Control Sciences, Moscow, Russia, in 1966. He was with the Institute of Control Sciences until 1977. From 1979 to 1984, he was with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL. Since 1984, he has been a Professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He has held visiting positions at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) (1978-1979), Stanford University (1991), and the Lady Davis Visiting Professorship at the Technion, Israel (1997-1998).