Professor S. Joe QIN

Professor Qin Si Zhao Joe is currently the Wai Kee Kau Chair Professor of Data Science and President of Lingnan University in Hong Kong. He previously served as Principal Engineer at Emerson Process Management from 1992 to 1995. Following this, he held various academic positions at the University of Texas at Austin from 1995 to 2007, including Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and Professor.  From 2003 to 2007, he held the Paul D. and Betty Robertson Meek and American Petrofina Foundation Centennial Professorship in Chemical Engineering.

From 2007 to 2019, he was the Fluor Professor at the Viterbi School of Engineering of the University of Southern California, during which he took a three-year 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 served in Hong Kong as the inaugural Dean of the School of Data Science and Chair Professor of Data Science at the City University of Hong Kong.

Professor Qin’s educational background is multidisciplinary. He obtained his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Automatic Control from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, in 1984 and 1987, respectively. He then continued studying for his Ph.D. in Automation at Tsinghua University until 1989, when he moved to the U.S. to pursue a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park, which he completed in June 1992.

Professor Qin is a Member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts (EASA), a Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of Engineering (HKAE), the U.S. National Academy of Inventors, the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), AIChE, and IEEE. He is the recipient of the 2022 CAST Computing in Chemical Engineering Award by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) and the 2022 IEEE CSS Transition to Practice Award. To date, he is the first and only recipient from China to receive both awards. Professor Qin was inducted into Control Global's Process Automation Hall of Fame in April 2026, and he is the only scholar from the Hong Kong SAR to receive this distinction. 

In 2025, Professor Qin received a Second Prize at the Natural Science Award of the Chinese Association of Automation, a Second Prize at 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. He was also named among the World’s Top 2% Scientists by Stanford University from 2022 to 2025.

His early career accolades include the U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the 2011 Northrop Grumman Best Teaching award at Viterbi School of Engineering, the DuPont Young Professor Award, Halliburton/Brown & Root Young Faculty Excellence Award, NSF-China Outstanding Young Investigator Award, MOE-China Changjiang Professorship, and the IFAC Best Paper Prize for a model predictive control paper published in Control Engineering Practice.

With a prolific publication record of over 470 international journal papers, book chapters, conference papers, and presentations, Professor Qin is also the inventor of 15 U.S. patents. He has delivered over 130 invited seminars and conducted 26 short courses or workshops for industries and technical conferences. His h-indices for Web of Science, SCOPUS, and Google Scholar are 72, 77, and 91, respectively, and he has garnered over 45,400 citations on Google Scholar. He has advised more than 40 Ph.D. students, with 34 successfully graduating with Ph.D. degrees. His research interests encompass data science and analytics, machine learning, process monitoring, model predictive control, system identification, smart manufacturing, smart cities, energy efficiency, and predictive health maintenance.

Professor Qin has served as Senior Editor of Journal of Process Control, Editor of Control Engineering Practice, and a Member of the Editorial Board for Journal of Chemometrics, as well as Associate Editor for several other international journals. He was the National Organization Chair of the 10th IFAC Symposium on Advanced Control of Chemical Processes ADCHEM 2018.