Dr. Gui Weihua was born on 7 August 1950 into a railway-worker family in Wuhan, Hubei Province.

In 1963, he entered Xiangfan No. 5 Middle School (renamed Xiangyang No. 5 Middle School in 2011), where he completed both junior and senior secondary education.

In December 1968, he was sent to the countryside to live and work in Xindian Commune, Gucheng County, Hubei Province, and two years later was recruited by the Danjiang Aluminum Plant.

In April 1972, he was recommended for admission to the Department of Automation at the Central-South Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (renamed the Central South University of Technology in 1985 and reconstituted as CSU in 2000), majoring in Industrial Enterprise Electrification and Automation.

After graduating in October 1975, he returned to the Danjiang Aluminum Plant as a technician.

In October 1978, he entered the master’s programme in the same department and,

in October 1981, graduated with the highest overall score among all postgraduate students, subsequently joining the university faculty.

In April 1986, he was sponsored to undertake advanced studies at the University of Duisburg in Germany, where he conducted research on hierarchical structures for decoupling and regulation in dynamic large-scale systems as well as robot control.

After completing his programme in April 1988, he returned to the Department of Automatic Control Engineering at the Central South University of Technology, focusing on computer process control and large-scale systems control theory and applications. He was promoted to Associate Professor in the same year

and to Professor in 1990.

Beginning in 1991, Dr. Gui assumed a series of leadership roles, serving as Deputy Chair of the Department of Automatic Control Engineering (December 1991 – October 1995), Vice Dean of the School of Information Engineering (October 1995 – September 1997), and Party Secretary of the school (September 1997 – September 1999).

Following CSU’s disciplinary restructuring in 2002, he was appointed Dean of the School of Information Science and Engineering, a position he held until September 2010.

Dr. Gui advanced twice to the second-round evaluation for election to the Chinese Academy of Engineering,

first in July 2009 and again in May 2011.

In September 2013, the research team he led, “Control Theory, Technology, and Applications for Complex Nonferrous Metallurgical Processes”, received NSFC funding as an Innovative Research Group. On 19 December 2013, he was elected Academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering in the Division of Information and Electronic Engineering (Control Theory and Technology).

In 2016, his Innovative Research Group completed its evaluation with an “excellent” rating and received continued funding from the NSFC.