Dr. Qiang Zhu


Professor and Chair
William E. Stirton Professor

Department of Computer and Information Science
College of Engineering and Computer Science
University of Michigan - Dearborn
4901 Evergreen Road
Dearborn, MI 48128, USA
Office: 111 CIS    Phone: (313) 593-4998

Administrative Assistant Phone: (313) 583-6544
Department Office Phone: (313) 436-9145    Fax: (313) 593-9967


Brief Biography

Dr. Qiang Zhu is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Michigan - Dearborn. He is also the William E. Stirton Professor at the university. He is the founding director of the Data Science/Management Research Laboratory. He is also an affiliated faculty member of the Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS) at the University of Michigan. He joined the university in 1995 after he received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo (Canada). He also holds an M.Sc. from the McMaster Univeristy (Canada) and an M.Eng. and a B.Sc. from the Southeast University (China).

Dr. Zhu has been honored as an ACM Distinguished Scientist (2013) and an IBM CAS Faculty Fellow (2003). He is an IEEE senior member since 2005. He was a visiting scientist at IBM, conducting research on query optimization in advanced database systems. He was a lecturer at the Southeast University in China, teaching and supervising students at both undergraduate and graduate levels. He was an instructor at the University of Waterloo, teaching undergraduate database courses.

Dr. Zhu has many years research experience in data science/management and related applications. He has led and carried out research projects in various areas, including query optimization for emerging databases, multidimenstional indexing, big data analytics, k-nearest neighbor search, spatio-temporal data processing, streaming data processing, self-managing databases, distributed databases, data security and privacy, data mining, bioinformatics, and vehicular data management and applications (telematics and infotainment). His research has been funded by highly competitive external and internal sources, including NSF, IBM, Ford, OVPR, Rackham, REEDF, and CEEP. He was a recipient of numerous distinguished awards/honors including 2013 ACM Distinguished Scientist Award, 2004 IBM Faculty Award, 2003 IBM Faculty Award, 2001 UMD Distinguished Faculty Research Award, 1999 IBM University Partnership Research Award, and 1988 Scientific Progress Award of PRC Education Commission, as well as a number of best paper awards including 2008 Wilkes Award from The British Computer Society, recognizing excellence of his research. He has published over 120 research papers in various journals and conference proceedings including ACM Transactions on Database Systems (TODS), ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), The VLDB Journal (VLDBJ), Information Systems (IS), Data & Knowledge Engineering (DKE), IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (TPDS), IEEE Transactions on Computers (TC), IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems (TITS), IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON), and Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB). His research work has been cited by numerous research papers and included in several well-known research/text books. Dr. Zhu was invited to give research talks at many universities and industrial research centers/labs. He has served as an Editor-in-Chief, Associate Editor, and Editorial Board member for several international technical journals including Information Sciences (Elsevier), Journal of Big Data (Springer), and IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems (IEEE). He also served as a program/organizing committee member for over 160 international research conferences. He was a referee for numerous journals, conferences, and research grant proposals.

Main Research Interests

Database Research Group at UM-D

Course Taught in Winter 2020