Prof. TANG Loon Ching

Tang Loon Ching is a Professor at the Department of Industrial Systems Engineering & Management (ISEM) at the National University of Singapore (NUS). He served as the Director of Temasek Defence Systems Institute from 2014 to 2020 and the Head of Department of ISEM from 2008-2015. He has been appointed as a honorary adjunct professor of the Harbin Institute of Technology from 2018-2022. He has also been elected as the Region Vice President (Asia) for the Institute of Industrial & Systems Engineers (IISE) from 2012-2015.

LC Tang obtained his PhD in the field of operations research from Cornell University in 1992 under the NUS Overseas Scholarship. Prior to that, he graduated with a BEng (first class honors) in mechanical engineering and MEng (ISE) from NUS. He has published widely in many leading international journals in the field of Industrial Engineering & Operations Management (IEOM). He was presented the IISE Transactions 2010 Best Application Paper Award and the prestigious Ralph A. Evans/P.K. McElroy Awards for the best paper presented at 2011 Reliability and Maintainability Symposium. Both awards were the first time that they went to authors who are Singapore-based researchers while the latter was also the first time that the award went to authors affiliated to an Asian University in its 58-year history. He has been named 2014 IEOM Outstanding Educator by the IEOM Forum. He is a Fellow of the International Society of Engineering Asset Management.

LC Tang is the Editor-in-Chief of Quality and Reliability Engineering International, an international journal devoted to practical engineering aspects of quality and reliability; and has been on the editorial review board of the Journal of Quality Technology, which is the flagship journal of American Society for Quality, since 2006, among others. He is the main author of the book: Six Sigma: Advanced Tools for Black Belts and Master Black Belts (which is the winner of the inaugural Masing Book Prize by International Academy of Quality); and a co-author of Markov-Modulated Processes and Semiregenerative phenomena. He is one of the founding members of Global Ports Research Alliance, IIE Asian Network and the steering committee of Logistics and Maritime Systems Conference Series; and has served as the General Chair of these conference series during their formation years.

In recent years, he has focused his research on systems resilience and is a principal investigator of the Future Resilient systems programme (phase I and II) funded by the National Research foundation. He has frequently been invited as a keynote speaker for international conferences in the field of industrial engineering and reliability.

Besides being active in the forefront of research in Industrial Engineering and Operations Management, LC Tang has also been engaged as a consultant/trainer by many government agencies and MNCs in their enterprise transformation initiatives. He has served on the advisory board of DSTA Academy (2015-2020) and also served on the advisory board of Singapore Innovation and Productivity Institute (2011-2015). To-date, he has trained and mentored more than 100 Master Black Belts and provided training to thousands of data analysts, engineers and managers, from Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Israel, China, USA, Indonesia, India and the Philippines in the areas of Lean Six Sigma, Design for Six Sigma, Engineering Asset Management, Operations Research and Reliability Engineering.