Hao Ying, Ph.D., a 1990 doctoral graduate of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, was named an IEEE Fellow for outstanding contributions to theory and biomedical applications of fuzzy control. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the world’s largest professional association for the advancement of technology, has 385,000 members from 160 countries. Ying was one of only 321 people named an IEEE Fellow in 2011.
“I’m happy that my technical contributions have been recognized by the IEEE and by my peers,” said Ying. “Everything started for me at UAB and I am very grateful to the university and all the people in the UAB School of Engineering who supported me.”
Ying began his work in this field when he arrived at UAB in 1986. Doctors noted that about 10 percent of patients recovering from open heart surgery had high blood pressure, but nobody knew why some patients were affected while others were not. Each patient was monitored by a nurse and given blood pressure medicine manually with a drug pump.
Ying created an innovative way to maintain a patient's blood pressure by dispensing medicine through an automated fuzzy control system. A fuzzy control system is widely used in machine controls and is based on a mathematical system known as fuzzy logic. Ying’s blood pressure control paper is the first real-time clinical application of fuzzy control in the PubMed research database.
Ying is a professor at Wayne State University and the author of the book “Fuzzy Control and Modeling: Analytical Foundations and Applications.”