Yonghua Song was born in Bazhong City, Sichuan Province, China in January 1964. He is currently the Rector of the University of Macau, Director of State Key Laboratory of Internet of Things for Smart City, and Guest Professor of Tsinghua University. He is a fellow of Chinese Society of Electrical Engineering, an international member of Academia Europaea, a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

Yonghua Song received his B.Eng. and Ph.D. from Chengdu University of Science and Technology (now Sichuan University) and the China Electric Power Research Institute in 1984 and 1989 respectively. In 1991, a postdoctoral fellow in electrical engineering from Tsinghua University, he went to the UK and was appointed a Professor of Power Systems at Brunel University in 1997. In 2004, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, becoming the first Chinese scholar in the UK to receive the honour. In the same year, he was appointed Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Graduate Studies at Brunel University, the first Chinese vice-chancellor of a British university. In 2007, he took up a Pro-Vice Chancellorship and Professorship of Electrical Engineering at the University of Liverpool, holding the Executive President position at Xi’an Jiaotong – Liverpool University in Suzhou, China. In 2009, he was invited to return to China as a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Tsinghua University and was appointed Assistant President in the same year. In September 2009, he was appointed Director of Chinese National Office of the Recruitment Program of Global Experts. In November 2012, he served as Executive Vice President of Zhejiang University. On 9th January 2018, he became the 9th rector of the University of Macau.

Yonghua Song has long been committed to the research of theories and technologies of the operation and optimization of power systems. Yonghua Song has published 10 academic books in Chinese and English, over 350 SCI-indexed English journal papers, and more than 200 Chinese journal papers. He has received one Second Prize of the National Science and Technology Progress Award, six First Prizes of scientific innovations at the provincial/ministerial level, as well as the Ho Leung Ho Lee Foundation Award for Scientific and Technological Progress, the Guanghua Engineering Science and Technology Prize, and the National Innovation Excellence Award. Yonghua Song has served as the vice president of China Society for Electrical Engineering and the editor or editorial board member for several international and domestic academic journals. He has successfully supervised over 70 PhD students in the UK and China (including mainland and Macao SAR).