Professor Tim Kwang Ting CHENG, BS, PhD

Prof. Tim Kwang Ting Cheng was appointed Vice-President for Research and Development with effect from 1 April 2022. He joined HKUST in May 2016 as the Dean of Engineering, and Chair Professor jointly in the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering and in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.

Prof. Cheng graduated from University of California, Berkeley in 1988 with a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. Before coming to HKUST, he was a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he served since 1993. Prior to teaching at UC Santa Barbara, he spent five years at AT&T Bell Laboratories.

At UC Santa Barbara, Prof. Cheng had taken up various important academic leadership roles, such as Founding Director of the Computer Engineering Program from 1999 to 2002, Chair of Department of ECE from 2005 to 2008, Acting Associate Vice-Chancellor for Research in 2013 and Associate Vice-Chancellor for Research from 2014 to 2016 where he helped oversee the research development, infrastructure, and compliance of UCSB’s research enterprise with over US$200 million extramural research funding.

An internationally leading researcher with excellent experience in fostering cross-disciplinary research collaboration, Prof. Cheng is a world authority in the field of electronics testing and design verification, as well as an impactful contributor across a wide range of research areas including design automation of electronic and photonic systems, computer vision, and medical image analysis. He had previously served as Director of the US Department of Defense Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) Center for 3D Hybrid Circuits. He has published more than 700 technical papers, co-authored five books, held 20 US patents, and transferred several of his inventions into successful commercial products. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and Hong Kong Academy of Engineering Sciences (HKAES). His works are of high impact with due recognition from the field, including 10+ best paper awards in major conferences and journals, as well as CCF Award for Overseas Outstanding Award and Pan Wen Yuan Foundation Award for Outstanding Research. He was also recognized in the 50th Design Automation Conference (DAC) in 2013 as a Top 10 Author in DAC’s Fourth Decade and a Prolific Author.

In 2020, following the Hong Kong government’s InnoHK research clusters initiative, he led the founding of the AI Chip Center for Emerging Smart Systems for which four world-renowned universities participate. The multidisciplinary center aims to advance IC design to help realize ubiquitous AI applications in society.