Ying-Cheng Lai - Biography#

Professor Lai belongs to a small group of leading scholars in the interdisciplinary field of complex dynamical systems at both classical and quantum levels. His group spearheaded Relativistic Quantum Chaos (RQC), a field involving three major branches of physics: Quantum Mechanics, Relativity, and Chaos Theory, where the goal is to understand the manifestations or fingerprints of classical chaos in relativistic quantum systems. Professor Lai was among the first few who realised the importance of studying the role of classical chaos in affecting the relativistic quantum behaviours of two-dimensional Dirac materials based systems and devices. This new field of RQC is not only fundamental to physics, but will also have impacts in materials science, nanoscience and nanotechnology.

Another Prof. Lai’s major achievement is in the area of transient chaos. In the comprehensive Springer book entitled “Transient Chaos” published in 2011, he argued that, in natural systems, transient chaos is more ubiquitous than attractors and it is of both fundamental value and practical importance to identify, understand, predict, and control transient chaos. This general philosophy led his group to develop schemes to modulate quantum transport in nanoscale devices through harnessing transient chaos and to apply the theory of transient chaos to addressing fundamental problems in ecology. An achievement with impact to medicine is his careful analysis of the effectiveness of nonlinear dynamics based approaches to predicting epileptic seizures. His group also pioneered the field of compressive-sensing based identification of complex dynamical systems with impacts in network science and engineering and beyond.

Professor Lai has been engaged extremely actively in international collaborations. He has a track record of collaborations with researchers in Europe (Germany, United Kingdom, Hungary, Spain, Italy, and Poland) and Asia (China, Singapore, South Korea, and Japan). A number of his former students and postdocs have become influential researchers in China, and his lab has hosted a large number of visiting scholars. He holds visiting appointments at about half dozen universities in China, and his network of collaboration has generated approximately 80 papers in high impact journals in the past five years.