Prof Tang has served as its Co-Editor-in-Chief since its formation. He is also the Co-Editor-in-Chief of Quality and Reliability Engineering International published by Wiley which is the first international journal, founded in 1985, that covers both quality and reliability engineering in the world.
Professor Tang has been with the Department since 1987. He has served as the Head of Department of ISEM from 2008 to 2015 and the Director of Temasek Defence Systems Institute from 2014 to 2020. He has been elected as the Fellow of Academy of Engineering, Singapore in 2022, appointed as Global Distinguished Educator of Zhejiang University in 2024 and selected as PIFI Distinguished Scientist by the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2025. He has also been elected as the Region Vice President (Asia) for the Institute of Industrial & Systems Engineers (IISE) from 2012-2015.
During his tenure as the Head of Department, he devoted department resources in maritime logistics research and systems engineering programme. He strategically positioned the Department as one of the founding members of Global Ports Research Alliance, IIE Asian Network and was one of the founding steering committee of Logistics and Maritime Systems Conference Series. He 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 has served as the leading 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 systems engineering and reliability and is widely recognized as a thought-leader in this field of research.
One of his firm beliefs is that “In today’s highly competitive environment, optimization could only give marginal improvement while re-designing the Concept of Operations through systems thinking and leveraging on emerging technologies will almost surely lead to breakthroughs and quantum leaps in system performance”.
Congratulations to Prof Tang once again!