ChengXiang Zhai is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he also holds a joint appointment at the Institute for Genomic Biology, Statistics, and the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. His research interests include information retrieval, text mining, natural language processing, machine learning, and bioinformatics, and has published over 200 papers in these areas with an H-index of 58 in Google Scholar. He is an Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Information Systems, and Information Processing and Management, and the Americas Editor of Springer's Information Retrieval Book Series. He is a conference program co-chair of ACM CIKM 2004, NAACL HLT 2007, ACM SIGIR 2009, ECIR 2014, ICTIR 2015, and WWW 2015, and conference general co-chair for ACM CIKM 2016. He is an ACM Distinguished Scientist and a recipient of multiple best paper awards, Rose Award for Teaching Excellence at UIUC, Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, IBM Faculty Award, HP Innovation Research Program Award, and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE).