Yongjing graduated from the University of Birmingham with a first-class BEng (Hons) in 2013, in a joint degree with Harbin Institute of Technology, China. His final year project, supervised by Professor Mietek Brdys, encouraged him to study for a PhD at the same institution under the supervision of Professor Duc Pham.
Yongjing’s PhD research focused on smart and active materials and structures with self-healing capabilities. His work on achieving high-level recovery at ultra-low temperatures has been reported in over 20 news media reports.
After obtaining his PhD degree in 2016, Yongjing continued to work in Professor Duc Pham’s group on robotic disassembly technologies, as part of the £2m EPSRC project AUTOREMAN. He was a core member of the AUTOREMAN research team, the lab manager of the Autonomous Remanufacturing Laboratory, and co-authored over 20 publications including a Springer book focused on disassembly sequence planning problems. Meanwhile, Yongjing built strong industrial partnerships with world-leading companies such as Caterpillar and KUKA, as well as emerging and active SMEs.
In 2020, Yongjing was appointed as an Assistant Professor at the newly established School of Engineering. In 2021, he was awarded the EPSRC New Investigator Award to build a research team on self-learning robotics for manufacturing automation. In 2023, he was promoted to Associate Professor.