Zongming Fei, professor of computer science at the University of Kentucky, is the new chair of the University of Kentucky Department of Computer Science. He has taught at UK since 2000.
Fei received a B.S. in computer science from Nanjing University in China in 1986, a master’s degree in computer science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1999 and a Ph.D. from the same institution in 2000. After arriving at UK in 2000, he was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2006 and full professor in 2015.
Fei is a member of the FABRIC leadership team. Launched in 2019 with a $20 million grant from the NSF, FABRIC is working to build a platform where computer scientists can test new ways to compute, move and store data. The adaptive programmable research infrastructure for computer science and science applications is a collaborative project with researchers from multiple institutions.
In 2019, Fei helped develop a new undergraduate certificate in cybersecurity and acted as co-director for the certificate program.
Fei succeeds professor Brent Seales, who had served as department chair since 2013. Seales received a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant to create EduceLab—a cultural heritage imaging and analysis laboratory—earlier this year.