Ellips Masehian is an associate professor at the Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering Dept. at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Prior to joining Cal Poly Pomona, he was an associate professor and director of the Robot Motion Planning laboratory at the Faculty of Engineering, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran. He received B.S. and M.S. degrees in industrial engineering, both from Iran University of Science and Technology, Tehran, with honors, and a Ph.D. degree from Tarbiat Modares University. His research is focused on robot motion planning, as well as the applications of heuristic, metaheuristic and intelligent methods to combinatorial optimization problems. He has authored many articles in journals such as Artificial Intelligence, Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, Journal of Field Robotics, IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, Robotics and Autonomous Systems, Robotica, Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems, Computational Optimization and Applications, etc. Dr. Masehian has served in Editorial Boards of a number of journals as member, reviewer, and guest editor, and has been Program chair and member of steering and Program Committees of many international conferences.