Yanfeng Ouyang holds a B.Eng. in civil engineering (summa cum laude, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 2000), M.S. in civil engineering (University of Washington, 2001), M.S. in industrial engineering and operations research (University of California at Berkeley, 2005), and Ph.D. in civil engineering (University of California at Berkeley, 2005). He has been on the faculty of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign since August 2005, with affiliation in the Transportation Engineering group, the Sustainable and Resilient Infrastructure Systems Program, and the Energy, Water and Environment Sustainability Program. He is also affiliated with the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering and the Computational Science and Engineering Program.

He currently teaches undergraduate courses in systems engineering, transportation engineering, public transportation systems, and a graduate course on logistics systems. He appeared in the List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students seven times from 2005-2012.

Dr. Ouyang currently serves as a Department Editor of IIE Transactions Focused Issue on Operations Engineering and Analytics, an Associate Editor of Transportmetrica B: Transport Dynamics, and he is on the editorial advisory board of Transportation Research Part B and the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Journal of Infrastructure Systems. He also provides review/editorial services to more than 40 academic journals, more than 10 international conferences, and a number of funding agencies.  He is a member of the Transportation Research Board's (TRB) Network Modeling Committee (ADB30), Chair of TRB's Subcommittee on Transit, Freight and Logistics [ADB30(1)], Chair of the Freight Logistics Special Interest Grop (SIG) of the Institute of Operations Resarch and Management Science's (INFORMS) Transportation Science and Logistics (TSL) Society, and former treasurer of the INFORMS Railway Applications Section (RAS). He is also an affiliated member of ASCE. Professor Ouyang received the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the u.S. National Science Foundation in April 2008, the Xerox Faculty Research Award from the University of Illinois in 2010, and the Gordon F. Newell Award from the University of California - Berkeley in 2005.