Fantahun M. Defersha received his (i) B.Sc. degree in Mechanical Engineering in 1995 from Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia, (ii) MEng. degree (with thesis) in Mechanical Engineering with specialization in Production and Industrial Systems Engineering in 2000 from University of Roorkee (IIT-Roorkee), India, and (iii) Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering (Thesis area - Manufacturing System) in 2006 from Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. Prior to moving to Canada, he was a lecturer in the Technology Faculty of Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia, the country's most prestigious university. After completing his Ph.D. at Concordia University in 2006, he became a Research Associate and a Part-time Faculty in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering of Concordia University and continued till December 2009. He joined the School of Engineering, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario, CANADA, as an assistant professor in 2010 and promoted to tenured associate professor in 2015. His research interests are in (1) Manufacturing system analysis, flexible and cellular manufacturing systems, reconfigurable machine tools and reconfigurable manufacturing systems, part sequencing and scheduling, production and inventory planning, Vehicle routing and transportation network optimization, supply chain modeling and simulation, reverse logistics and remanufacturing systems analysis, artificial intelligence, meta-heuristics (2) development of hybrid heuristics for multi-objective optimization problems by combining analytical methods such as simplex algorithm and Lagrangian relaxation with search methods like genetic algorithm and tabu search, and (3) applications of parallel computing in those areas mentioned above.