Si-Zhao Joe Qin

Professor S. Joe Qin (Chinese: 秦泗釗) currently holds the position of Wai Kee Kau Chair Professor of Data Science and serves as the President of Lingnan University in Hong Kong.

Career From 1992 to 1995, Professor Qin served as a Principal Engineer at Emerson Process Management. He subsequently transitioned to academia, holding various positions at the University of Texas at Austin from 1995 to 2007, including assistant professor, associate professor, and professor. From 2003 to 2007, he held the Paul D. and Betty Robertson Meek and American Petrofina Foundation Centennial Professorship in Chemical Engineering.

From 2007 to 2019, he was the Fluor Professor at the Viterbi School of Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC), during which he took a three-year leave to serve as Vice President and Presidential Chair Professor at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen. From January 2020 to June 2023, he served in Hong Kong as the inaugural Dean of the School of Data Science and the Chair Professor of Data Science at the City University of Hong Kong.

Education Professor Qin possesses a diverse educational background encompassing multiple disciplines. He obtained his B.S. and M.S. in Automatic Control from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, in 1984 and 1987, respectively. He then continued studying for his PhD in Automation at Tsinghua University until 1989. In 1989, Qin moved to the United States to pursue a PhD in Chemical Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park, which he completed in June 1992.

Honors and awards

Honors Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 2011 Fellow of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), 2014 Fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), 2018 Fellow of the U.S. National Academy of Inventors (NAI), 2020 Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of Engineering (HKAE), 2023 Member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts (EASA), 2023 Process Automation Hall of Fame (Control Global), 2026

Awards

Halliburton/Brown & Root Young Faculty Excellence Award, 1999 DuPont Young Professor Award, 1999-2002 NSF China Outstanding Young Investigator Award (2003-2006) MOE China Changjiang Professorship (2006-2009) World's Top 2% Scientists by Stanford, 2019–present CAST Computing in Chemical Engineering Award from the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), 2022 IEEE CSS Transition to Practice Award, 2022 Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society, 2025 Liaoning Provincial 2nd Class Natural Science Award, 2025 Gold Award, Global AI Challenge for Building E&M Facilities, 2025 Silver Award Geneva International Exhibition of Inventions, 2025

Research Professor Qin's research interests encompass data science and analytics, machine learning, process monitoring, model predictive control, system identification, smart manufacturing, smart cities, energy efficiency, and predictive health maintenance.

Qin held 12 U.S patents as of 2023. He has a prolific publication record of over 470 international journal papers, book chapters, conference papers, and presentations. His h-indices for Web of Science, SCOPUS, and Google Scholar are 71, 77, and 90, respectively. His work has garnered over 43,000 citations on Google Scholar (as of November 2025).

Editorial/Professional activities Editor for Control Engineering Practice (IFAC), 1999-2005 Member of the Editorial Board for the Journal of Chemometrics (1999-2020) Senior Editor for the Journal of Process Control, 2015-2018 Associate Editor for Journal of Process Control (2005-2015; 2019–present) Associate Editor for several other international journals, including IEEE Control Systems Magazine (2011-2013) National Organization Chair of the 10th IFAC Symposium on Advanced Control of Chemical Processes ADCHEM 2018 in Shenyang National Organization Chair of the 13th IFAC Symposium on Advanced Control of Chemical Processes ADCHEM 2027 in Hong Kong