August 15, 2019

Jianlin Cheng was named Faculty Fellow for Research and Strategic Initiatives on Thursday.

On Thursday, Mizzou Engineering Dean Elizabeth Loboa announced the selection of Jianlin Cheng, William and Nancy Thompson Missouri Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, as the College of Engineering’s Faculty Fellow for Research and Strategic Initiatives.

Cheng has been the recipient of numerous competitive grants from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Department of Energy and the Department of Education. He has been on 10 federal grants as principal investigator, co-PI or co-I totaling an impressive $16.35 million in awards since joining MU. In addition to consistently being ranked among the top researchers in the college, Cheng is currently the PI of three ongoing NSF/NIH grants totaling $2.37M and co-PI of one NSF grant at $1.67 million.

“Given all of his experience, I am thrilled to welcome and congratulate Jack as he steps into this role and provides his expertise to continue moving the College’s research growth plan forward,” Loboa said.

In 2019, Cheng was named as one of the top 100 AI leaders in the world in drug discovery and healthcare by Deep Knowledge Analytics. His research focuses on cross campus collaborations and has produced 128 journal publications in 42 international journals with more than 9,800 citations. Cheng has an h-index of 44 and a research reputation score of 41.5 on ResearchGate, ranking among top 2.5%. Cheng has 18 conference papers/tutorials and 160 conference abstracts. He has helped co-organize many national, international and regional conferences and seminars and has served on various college committees including faculty search committees, the budget committee, Dean’s Council for Research Excellence, promotion and tenure and the space committee.

In addition to his outstanding research accomplishments, Cheng has taught 10 different courses in machine learning, data mining, bioinformatics and general computer science. Between 2012 and 2017, he received an average of 4.7 / 5 on his teaching evaluations. He has participated in the design and development of the MU Informatics PhD Program, computer science machine learning track and computer science PhD qualifying exam. Cheng has advised five postdocs, 47 graduate students (23 PhDs and 24 MS). He has graduated 31 graduate students (10 PhD and 21 MS), and seven of the PhD graduates secured tenure-track assistant professor positions at US universities. He has also advised 23 undergraduate students, five international visiting scholars, six high school students and 13 rotation/visiting students.

Cheng serves as a regular member of the NIH BDMA study section, has served as an NIH panelist 32 times and as an NSF panelist/reviewer 23 times. He is an associate editor of ACM/IEEE Transaction on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics and an action editor of Neural Networks. He has served on the editorial board of five journals, including Scientific Reports, and reviewed papers for 33 journals. Cheng is affiliated with AAAS, ACM, IEEE, ISCB, ACM SIGBIO and MCBIOS.