Professor K.-T. Tim Cheng received his Ph.D. in EECS from the University of California, Berkeley in 1988. He has been serving as Dean of Engineering and Chair Professor of ECE and CSE at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) since May 2016. He worked at Bell Laboratories from 1988 to 1993 and joined the faculty at Univ. of California, Santa Barbara in 1993 where he was the founding director of UCSB’s Computer Engineering Program (1999-2002), Chair of the ECE Department (2005-2008) and Associate Vice Chancellor for Research (2013-2016).  Prof Cheng is a world-renowned authority on VLSI design verification and testing, and a cross-disciplinary research contributor across a wide range of research areas including computer vision, medical image analysis, and design automation for electronic and photonic systems. He has published extensively, supervised over 60 PhD dissertations, co-founded three companies and transferred several of his inventions into successful commercial products.

Cheng is an IEEE fellow and have received 10+ Best Paper Awards from various IEEE and ACM conferences and journals. He has also received UCSB College of Engineering Outstanding Teaching Faculty Award. He served as Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Design and Test of Computers and was a board member of IEEE Council of Electronic Design Automation’s Board of Governors and IEEE Computer Society’s Publication Board.