Prior to that, he was on the faculty of Industrial and Management Systems Engineering at the University of South Florida. Dr. Zeng’s research focuses on optimization theory and methodology, particularly on discrete and multilevel optimization, and their applications in power, transportation, healthcare and other cyber-physical systems. His research results have been applied in various practical systems to address planning, protection and operational issues to mitigate risk or uncertainty. He is widely published in Mathematical Programming, Discrete Optimization, IEEE Trans. on Automatic Control, on Power Systems, and on Smart Grids.