Jian Peng has a broad background in bioinformatics and computational biology, with specific training and expertise in developing statistical and algorithmic methods for biological data analysis. His research includes large-scale data integration, network biology, structural bioinformatics, and machine learning. Peng has developed a number of widely-used bioinformatics programs for protein structure prediction, protein-binding prediction, automated gene function annotation, biological network analysis, sequence modeling, and large-scale genomic sequence search. In particular, Peng has developed novel machine learning algorithms for large-scale omics data integration analysis, network-driven cancer genomics, and protein interaction modeling. Algorithms developed by Peng and his co-workers were successful in several scientific challenges, including the Critical Assessment of Protein Structure Prediction (CASP) competitions and a few DREAM challenges on translational medicine and pharmacogenomics. Recently, Jian has received the Overton Prize, an NSF CAREER Award, a PhRMA Foundation Award, and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship.
Peng has been a professor of computer science at UIUC since 2015. Before joining Illinois, Jian was a postdoc at CSAIL at MIT and a visiting scientist at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. He obtained his PhD in Computer Science from Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago.