Yafei Liu is currently an Associate Professor and Master's Supervisor at the School of Smart City and Transportation, Southwest Jiaotong University. He received his B.E. degree in Automation (Railway Signalling) from Beijing Jiaotong University in 2016, and his Ph.D. degree in Traffic Information Engineering and Control from the same university in 2022, under the supervision of Prof. Tao Tang. From 2019 to 2020, he was a jointly trained visiting researcher at the Institute for Transport Studies, University of Leeds, UK, where he worked with Prof. Ronghui Liu.

His research interests primarily focus on intelligent train driving, railway operation optimization and control, multi‑vehicle cooperative platooning control, model predictive control, and reinforcement learning. He has published over 20 SCI/EI papers in leading transportation journals such as Transportation Research Part C, Computer‑Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering, and IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology. His Google Scholar citations exceed 500. He has actively participated in international academic conferences, including the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference (ITSC), where he has delivered multiple presentations. He serves as a Youth Editorial Board Member for the journal Urban Rail Transit, and as a reviewer for several SCI journals, including IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology, and Transportation Research Part C. He is also a member of the China Intelligent Transportation Systems Association.

Dr. Liu has led several research projects, including the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) Youth Program, the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation General Grant, the Sichuan Provincial Natural Science Foundation Youth Program, and the Open Project of the State Key Laboratory of Advanced Rail Autonomous Operation. He has also participated in multiple key projects under the National Key R&D Program of China, NSFC projects, and international cooperative research initiatives. He was selected for the 2023 "Qingmiao Plan" of Southwest Jiaotong University, received the 2022 National Railway Youth Science and Technology Innovation Award, and won the Best Paper Award at IEEE ICIRT 2025.