Louis, Missouri, USA. He received his B.S. and M.S. in computer engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, and his Ph.D. in computer science from University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). Professor Zhang's research interests include computational molecular biology and genomics, artificial intelligence (heuristic search, machine learning, constraint optimization, distributed multi-agent systems), data mining, and combinatorial optimization. He has published more than 80 papers in these areas and is the author of a research monograph, State-Space Search: Algorithms, Complexity, Extensions and Applications, published by Springer in 1999.