Rate My Professor Ying-Cheng Lai

Ying-Cheng Lai is a Regents Professor and ISS Endowed Professor of Electrical Engineering at Arizona State University, where he also serves as Professor of Physics. He received his BS and MS degrees in Optical Engineering from Zhejiang University in 1982 and 1985, respectively, and MS and PhD degrees in Physics from the University of Maryland at College Park in 1989 and 1992. His PhD thesis addressed classical and quantum chaos under the supervision of Celso Grebogi, James A. Yorke, and Edward Ott. Following his doctorate, Lai was a postdoctoral fellow in the Biomedical Engineering Department at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine from 1992 to 1994. He joined the University of Kansas in 1994 as Assistant Professor of Physics and Mathematics, becoming Associate Professor in 1998. In 1999, he came to Arizona State University as Associate Professor of Mathematics and Electrical Engineering, was promoted to Professor in 2001, and transitioned to full-time Electrical Engineering in 2005. Additionally, he held the Sixth Century Chair in Electrical Engineering at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, from 2009 to 2017. Since 2014, he has been the ISS Endowed Professor of Electrical Engineering at ASU, and in 2021, he was named Regents Professor, the highest faculty honor at the university.

Lai's research specializations encompass nonlinear dynamics and chaos, machine learning applied to complex dynamical systems, relativistic quantum chaos, complex networks, mathematical biology, and theoretical ecology. He has published approximately 630 papers, garnering over 37,000 citations with a Google Scholar h-index of 90 and i10-index of 496. He is the author of the book Transient Chaos and has made seminal contributions, such as methods for detecting hidden nodes in complex networks, chaos regularization of relativistic quantum tunneling, and scaling laws for network controllability. His accolades include the Air Force Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers and NSF Faculty Career Award in 1997, American Physical Society Fellowship in 1999 for contributions to the fundamentals of nonlinear dynamics and chaos, Department of Defense Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship in 2016, Corresponding Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2018, election to Academia Europaea in 2020, and American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellowship in 2020. Lai has delivered about 300 invited lectures worldwide and held editorial roles, including on Physical Review E, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, Scientific Reports, International Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos, and as Co-Editor of Europhysics Letters.