Jianlin Cheng is an associate professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Missouri. He is affiliated with the University of Missouri Informatics Institute, the National Center for Soybean Biotechnology, the Interdisciplinary Plant Group and the Bond Life Science Center. His research is focused on developing computational methods and tools for big biomedical data analysis. His research group has developed a number of software tools for analyzing protein structure and function, biological sequences and networks and 3-D genome structure, which are used by scientists around the world. His research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Department of Education and the University of Missouri. Cheng is a recipient of the NSF CAREER award and the MU College of Engineering’s junior faculty research award.