Dr. Clarence W. de Silva, P.E., Fellow ASME and Fellow IEEE, is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada and occupies the Senior Canada Research Chair professorship in Mechatronics and Industrial Automation. Prior to this position, he occupied the NSERC-BC Packers Research Chair in Industrial Automation since 1988. He has served as a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University (1978-87) and a Fulbright Visiting Professor at the University of Cambridge (1987/88). Dr. de Silva earned Ph.D. degrees from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1978) and the University of Cambridge, England (1998), as well as an honorary D.Eng. degree from the University of Waterloo (2008).

Dr. de Silva has also occupied the Mobil Endowed Chair Professorship in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the National University of Singapore; Honorary Professorship of Xiamen University, China; and Honorary Chair Professorship of National Taiwan University of Science and Technology. Other Fellowships include: Fellow, Royal Society of Canada; Fellow, Canadian Academy of Engineering; Lilly Fellow at Carnegie Mellon University; NASA-ASEE Fellow; Senior Fulbright Fellow at Cambridge University; Fellow of the Advanced Systems Institute of BC; Killam Fellow; Erskine Fellow at University of Canterbury; Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne; and Peter Wall Scholar at the University of British Columbia.