Computer Science Professor Zhi Wei Elevated to IEEE Fellow

Professor Zhi Wei in Ying Wu College of Computing’s Department of Computer Science has been elevated to IEEE Fellow status effective Jan. 1, 2024. The appointment is in recognition of his significant contributions to knowledge discovery from biological data and in the field of bioinformatics.

Following a rigorous evaluation process, the IEEE Fellow Committee recommends a select group of recipients to the IEEE Board of Directors. Less than 0.1% or approximately 300 voting IEEE members worldwide are selected for this honor annually. Criteria for selection is based upon high-impact scientific contributions of intellectual merit and originality.

Wei’s first contribution is his dependency-aware learning methods with application to knowledge discovery from biological data. Many biological data are high dimensional (<2000 genes) and exhibit complex dependencies due to gene-gene interaction. Wei developed several innovative learning methods to model biological data with complex dependencies, as well as pioneering the development of graphical models to explicitly characterize the sophisticated gene-network-structured dependency among genomic data.

His second contribution is in his bioinformatics achievements, including numerous groundbreaking discoveries from biological data attributed to standardized bioinformatics tools innovated by him and his students. In the past two decades, Wei and his students have developed cutting-edge computational methods that have advanced the analysis of emerging biological data.

Wei’s bioinformatics contributions have greatly influenced many biomedical research fields, including cancer research, genetic disorders, mental illnesses, chronic diseases, and infectious diseases, among others. His promising results on genetic risk prediction led to a paradigm shift in the genetics field.

Collectively, Wei’s dependency-aware and bioinformatics methods have had a profound impact on data science, a field increasingly embraced by many IEEE societies.

His status as an IEEE Fellow is also significant for the fact that Wei has earned this recognition fairly early in his career and is one of the younger such fellows.

“I began at NJIT in 2008 in my first job as a faculty member. All of my achievements have taken place here, and I call this university home,” he said.

Wei’s work has been published in leading machine learning and data mining journals and conferences such as Nature Machine Intelligence, Nature Communications, IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (TNNLS), NIPS, KDD, AAAI, and IJCAI. His research has also been featured in prestigious statistics journals, including the Journal of the American Statistical Association (JASA), Biometrika, Annals of Applied Statistics (AoAS), and Biostatistics. His extensive collaborations with biologists, geneticists, and physicians have resulted in over 20 papers published in top-tier journals such as Nature, Science, Cell, Nature Medicine, Nature Genetics, Lancet Neurology, Cancer Discovery, Science Translational Medicine, and Immunity over the past three years. Cumulatively, he has authored or co-authored more than 150 publications, accumulating over 17,000 citations, and has played pivotal roles as a Principal Investigator (PI), co-PI, or co-Investigator (co-I) in externally funded research programs from various prestigious funding agencies, including NIH, NSF, DoD, and industry, totaling more than $60M. Wei is a recipient of the Adobe Data Science Research Award."

His recent paper on dependency-aware deep generative models for multitasking analysis of spatial genomics data has been conditionally accepted by Nature Methods, another high impact research journal.