American computer scientist
ChengXiang Zhai is a computer scientist. He is a Donald Biggar Willett Professor in Engineering in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Biography.
Zhai received the BS (1984), MS (1987, under Guoliang Zheng), and PhD (1990, under Jiafu Xu) in Computer Science from Nanjing University. He spent 1990 to 1993 working at Nanjing University's State Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology. In 1993, he left for America to pursue a second PhD, this time at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) with David A. Evans. Evans then left to spend more time with the company ClariTech. Zhai obtained from CMU a MS (1997) in computational linguistics and then started working with John Lafferty. He finally received from CMU a PhD in Language and Information Technologies in 2002.
Since then, he has been an Assistant Professor (2002–2008), Associate Professor (2008–2013), Professor (2013–2018), and Donald Biggar Willett Professor (2018–) at the UIUC Department of Computer Science. He also holds joint appointments with the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, Department of Statistics, and School of Information Sciences at UIUC.
Personal.
Zhai's son Alex has earned three medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad.
References.
 ;templatestyles src="Reflist/styles.css" / ;