Kan Liu received his BEng in Automation Engineering in 2005 from the Hunan University (founded in 976 AD, it is now a member of Project 985 and sponsored by the Ministry of Education of China aiming to become a world-class university) and then started to work toward his combined master's and doctoral degree in Control Theory and Control Engineering. In 2008, he was awarded a scholarship from the China Scholarship Council and became a joint PhD student between Hunan University and the University of Sheffield. Since then, he has spent more than seven years studying and working in the EMD group at the University of Sheffield. From 2013 to 2016, he was a research associate in the EMD group at the University of Sheffield. From 2016 to 2017, he was a lecturer in the Control Systems group at the Loughborough University. Since 14 September 2017, he has been a professor at the College of Mechanical and Vehicle Engineering, Hunan University.