Ran Cheng received the B.Sc. degree from Northeastern University, Shenyang, China, in 2010, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Surrey, Guildford, U.K., in 2016. He is currently an Associate Professor with the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, China. 

His research interests mainly fall into the interdisciplinary fields across evolutionary computation and other major AI branches such as statistical learning and deep learning, aiming to provide end-to-end solutions to optimization/modeling problems in scientific research and engineering applications.He is a recipient of the 2019 IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award, the 2018 and 2021 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTATION Outstanding Paper Awards, and the 2020 IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine Outstanding Paper Award. He serves as Associate Editors of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON EVOLUTIONARY COMPUTATION, the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, and the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COGNITIVE AND DEVELOPMENTAL SYSTEMS. He is the Chair of IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Shenzhen Chapter.