Professor Xunyu Zhou obtained his BSc in mathematics in 1984 and his PhD in operations research and control theory in 1989, both from Fudan University. He spent one year of PhD study at Keio University to learn probability theory from Professor H. Tanaka, a world renowned scholar. From 1989 to 1993, he received fellowships from Monbusho of the Japanese Government and The Manufacturing Research Corporation of Ontario to undertake research at Kobe University and University of Toronto, respectively. He joined the Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management of The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1993 as a lecturer, and was promoted to Senior Lecturer and Reader in 1998 and 2002 respectively. He is also a guest professor of The University of Sciences and Technology of China.

　　Professor Zhou is an internationally renowned expert in stochastic control and applications. His fundamental contributions to stochastic control include establishing a relation between maximum principle and dynamic programming via the viscosity solution theory, and introducing and developing the indefinite stochastic LQ control theory. He is a winner of the 2003 SIAM Outstanding Paper Prize together with Professors David Yao and Shuzhong Zhang. Winners of this prize are selected among 10 SIAM specialized research journals in the four years prior to the award, all of which are top-notch journals. He is also a recipient of the first class award of the Science & Technology Progress Awards, Shanghai Municipality. He has published over 70 journal papers, 1 research monograph, and 2 edited books. The research monograph, entitled Stochastic Controls and published by Springer in 1999, is widely acclaimed as "a major reference", "an authoritative book", "an excellent and superb book" by major book reviews such as Mathematical Reviews and Zentralblatt. He is the principal investigator of 7 RGC grants, co-investigator of 3 RGC grants and 1 Industrial funding, and a total funding size close to 10 million dollars. He has been invited to give keynote speeches at a number of international conferences, and has given seminars at universities around the world. He was elected Fellow of Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) in 2005.

　　Professor Zhou has served on the editorial board of three top scholarly journals: Operations Research (1999-), Mathematical Finance (2001-), and IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control (1999-2003). He won the 2001 Meritorious Service Award of The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) for his outstanding service. He is a member of the Engineering Panel of RGC.

　　Recently Professor Zhou has turned his research attention to applications in finance and insurance, and has established a systematic theory on extending Markowitz's Nobel-prize-winning mean--variance portfolio selection model from single period to continuous time. His work in financial applications is highly commended by Dr. Kenneth Arrow and Dr. Harry Markowitz, both Nobel Laureates in Economics.

return to previous page
return to press release index
return to homepage