Dr. Jia is currently an associate editor of IEEE Transaction on Automation Science and Engineering. He served on the Conference Editorial Board of IEEE Robotics and Automation Society from 2006 to 2008, and was a co-editor of a Special Issue (on Tactile Presence) of the International Journal of Robotics Research in 2000.

He was a visiting associate professor in the Department of Computer Science, Stanford University in Fall 2006, and the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University in Spring and Summer 2007. Before joining ISU he spent eight months as a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota. He also instructed at the CMU Robotics Institute in Spring 1998.

Yan-Bin obtained an M.S. and Ph.D. in Robotics from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where he was a graduate student from September 1990 through December 1997. His B.S. in Computer Science was received from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) [alumni page], where he studied in the Special Class for the Gifted Young [少年班] (class story) from 1984 to 1988. From 1988 to 1990 he was an M.S. student of USTC and worked on temporal logic in the Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Yan-Bin came from Chengdu[成都] (pictures) in Sichuan[四川], China, where he was born in 1969. In case of your curiosity, his first name consists of two Chinese characters "Yan" (燕) and "Bin" (斌). The character 燕 means the swallow, reflecting his birth in the spring, a season when swallows return from the south. The character 斌 carries the good wish from his parents that he would have both intellectual achievement and good health when grown up.