Dr. Zheng Yan is currently a Huashan distinguished professor at the Xidian University, China. She is an External Member of Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, a Fellow of IEEE, IET, AAIA, and AIIA. She received the B. Eng in electrical engineering and M. Eng in computer science and engineering from Xi’an Jiaotong University in 1994 and 1997. She received a second M. Eng in information security from National University of Singapore in 2000. She earned the Licentiate of Science and the Doctor of Science in Technology in electrical engineering from Helsinki University of Technology (i.e., Aalto University) in 2005 and 2007. She joined the Nokia Research Center, Helsinki in 2000, working as a senior researcher until 2011. She worked as a visiting professor and a Finnish Academy Fellow at the Aalto University, Finland for over seven years.

Her research interests are in cyber trust, security, privacy, and data analytics. She has led 30+ projects, sponsored by EU, Academy of Finland, NSFC, MOST, telecom industry, etc. At the helm of a research team with 70+ members, she has supervised 180+ post-doctoral researchers and graduates. She has authored 450+ publications, with 300+ first and corresponding authorships, featured prominently in top-tier venues. 17 of them are top 0.1% or 1% highly-cited ESI papers. She is the sole author of two books on trust management, utilized in teaching for a decade. She invented 220+ patents, among which 150+ patents (including 83 independent  international inventions) have been adopted by industry, a few of them have been incorporated into international standards and widely used in practice with billions of users. She has delivered 50+ invited keynote speeches and talks at international conferences and world-leading companies. Her Google Scholar citation is about 20,000 with an H-index of 71.

Zheng served and is serving as an EiC/area/associate/guest editor for 60+ reputable journals, e.g., co-EiC of Information Sciences, associate editor of ACM Computing Surveys, area editor of Information Fusion. She is a steering committee member of several conferences, a general/program chair for 50+ international conferences. She is a founding steering committee co-chair of IEEE International Conference on Blockchain, which becomes a leading venue in the field. She is currently serving as a Member of IEEE Fellow Committee.

Dr. Yan is recognized as a Stanford World Top 2% Scientist since 2019, an Elsevier Highly Cited Chinese Researcher since 2020, and a ScholarGPS World Top 0.05% Highly Ranked Scholar - Prior Five Years (2024). She has earned many accolades, including Distinguished Inventor of Nokia for significant technology contributions, N²Women Star in Computer Networking and Communications, IEEE TCSC Award for Excellence in Scalable Computing, IEEE TEMS Distinguished Leadership Award, ELEC Impact Award for patent contributions to Finnish society, the Best Journal Paper Award issued by IEEE ComSoc, IEEE Andrew P. Sage Best Transactions Paper, and several other Best Paper awards, 18 times IEEE Distinguished/Outstanding Leadership/Service awards, three EU awards, Excellent PhD Dissertation Supervisor Award of Chinese Society of Electronic Education, Shaanxi Nature Science Prize, etc. Her students have been rewarded more than 70 national or international awards. Her excellence has been covered by the media on numerous occasions.