Prof. Tim Cheng became the Dean of Engineering in May 2016 in concurrence with his appointment as Chair Professor jointly in the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering and in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. Before joining HKUST, he was a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), where he served since 1993. Prior to teaching at UC Santa Barbara, he spent five years at AT&T Bell Laboratories, and had taken up various important academic leadership roles, such as Founding Director of the Computer Engineering Program from 1999 to 2002, Chair of the Department of ECE from 2005 to 2008, Acting Associate Vice-Chancellor for Research in 2013 and Associate Vice-Chancellor for Research from 2014 to 2016 where he helped oversee the research development, infrastructure, and compliance of UCSB's research enterprise with over US$200 million of extramural research funding. An internationally leading researcher with excellent experience in fostering cross-disciplinary research collaboration, Prof Cheng is a world authority in the field of very-large-scale integration (VLSI) testing and design verification, as well as an impactful contributor across a wide range of research areas including design automation of electronic and photonic systems, computer vision, and medical image analysis. He had previously served as Director of the US Department of Defense's Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI), Center for 3D Hybrid Circuits. He has published more than 500 technical papers, co-authored five books, and hold 12 US patents. Several of his inventions have been successfully transferred into successful commercial products.