Professor S. Joe Qin is President of Lingnan University and the Wai Kee Kau Chair Professor of Data Science. Lingnan's Office of the President records that he was a principal engineer at Emerson Process Management in the United States from 1992 to 1995, then an assistant professor, associate professor and professor at the University of Texas at Austin from 1995 to 2007, holding the Paul D. and Betty Robertson Meek and American Petrofina Foundation Centennial Professorship in Chemical Engineering from 2003 to 2007. From 2007 to 2019 he was the Fluor Professor at the Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California, taking three years' 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 was the inaugural Dean of the School of Data Science and Chair Professor of Data Science at City University of Hong Kong. His education is multidisciplinary. He obtained his B.S. and M.S. in automatic control from Tsinghua University in 1984 and 1987, studied for a PhD in automation at Tsinghua until 1989, and completed a PhD in chemical engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park in June 1992. He is a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, a Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of Engineering and the US National Academy of Inventors, and a Fellow of IFAC, AIChE and IEEE. He received the 2022 CAST Computing in Chemical Engineering Award from AIChE and the 2022 IEEE Control Systems Society Transition to Practice Award; the university says he is the first and only recipient from China to receive both. He has published more than 470 journal papers, book chapters, conference papers and presentations, holds 15 US patents, has given over 130 invited seminars and conducted 26 short courses or workshops. His h-indices for Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar are 72, 77 and 91, with over 45,400 Google Scholar citations, and he has supervised more than 40 doctoral students, 34 of whom have graduated. In 2025 he received a Second Prize in the Natural Science Award of the Chinese Association of Automation, a Second Prize in the Liaoning Provincial Science and Technology Awards, a Silver Medal at the International Exhibition of Inventions Geneva and a Silver Award at the Silicon Valley International Festival, and he was named among Stanford University's top 2% scientists from 2022 to 2025.
Achievements
- 2022 · Received the AIChE CAST Computing in Chemical Engineering Award and the IEEE CSS Transition to Practice Award