Jian Peng, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is also affiliated with the College of Medicine, the Institute of Genomic Biology, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. The Peng lab has developed numerous computational approaches for biological data analysis, including the application of deep learning techniques to protein structure prediction and the invention of a novel computational framework for simultaneous dimensionality reduction of multiple heterogeneous biological networks. The latter enabled state-of-the-art function prediction and drug discovery and the development of TransposeNet, an approach that translates discoveries from model organisms to humans, which has been successfully applied to building the first genome-scale alpha-synuclein genetic network.

Dr. Peng has received multiple awards in the field of computational biology, including an ISCB Overton prize, a Sloan Research Fellowship, an NSF CAREER award, and a PhRMA Foundation Award in Informatics.