Cornell University central campus, the most beautiful campus I have ever seen.

Rice University, viewed from under the Lovett Hall.

The library of Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China.

The Hongci Temple (also called Da Zhao) in Huhehot, Inner-Mongolia (1580 A.D.).

Kevin is playing and enjoying himself on the Iowa State campus.

Phone: 515-294-8165

Fax: 515-294-5454

E-mail: zhijun@iastate.edu

Contact information:

The advanced photon source at Argonne National Lab. in Chicago suburb.

About ME

I am a professor in the Department of Mathematics and a joint faculty member in the Program on Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (BCB). I have students from the math department as well as the BCB program. The courses I have taught include optimization theory and methods (math690v) for the math department and computational structural biology (bcb597) for BCB, in addition to some other regular graduate/undergraduate courses in the math department.

 

I received my B.S. degree in computer science from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China, in 1982 and Ph.D. degree in computational and applied mathematics from Rice University, United States, in 1991. I have also two master’s degrees in computational linguistics, one from Wuhan University, China and another from Rice. I consider myself as a computer scientist and a computational mathematician (and a half linguist because of my experience with the two master’s degrees). I probably know a little bit more biology than my average math colleagues as well because of the interdisciplinary nature of the research I have been involved in computational biology.

 

I was born and grew up in Huhehot, Inner-Mongolia, China, a small town in northern China with many different northern Chinese ethnic groups, Mongolians, Manchu’s, Muslins, as well as Han Chinese. I am half Han and half Manchu, but I am not sure if my Han part is real Han and if my Manchu part is not mixed with Mongol. I believe that this is typical of northern Chinese even if they have registered officially as Han for generations. Huhehot has been an extremely important political and cultural center for major northern Chinese minorities for thousands of years. However, I have not realized that the city I was born in was such an exotic place until later on I had chances to read some history about the region.

 

I was a middle school teacher before I was allowed to take the college entrance exam to go to college in 1977 when the Cultural Revolution in China just ended. After college, I did graduate study in computational linguistics, with Professor Jiyan Fan and Professor Zhimin Xu at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. The two professors were the pioneers in research on natural language processing in China. In 1986, I came to United States and entered the graduate program at Rice. I worked with a renowned professor Dr. Sydney Lamb on natural language understanding and machine translation and earned a master’s degree in 1988. I then started my Ph.D. study in computational mathematics.

 

The change from computational linguistics to computational mathematics was not an easy turn. I also wanted to finish it fast for I thought that I had been after college for too long. Rice has a strong computational math program with many prominent faculty members. I worked with Professor Robert Bixby and Professor John Dennis, two leading experts in linear and nonlinear optimization, and developed a so-called sub-gradient algorithm for solving mixed-integer nonlinear programs. Three years of my hard work paid off and made me a Ph.D. in computational and applied mathematics. Then, a long career path for me began.

 

My career after my Ph.D. study started as a postdoctoral associate at Cornell, where I worked with Tom Coleman in Computer Science and David Shalloway in Molecular Biology and was introduced the first time to the famous protein folding problem. I was asked if I could solve the global optimization problem associated with protein folding, a question that has fascinated and challenged me most intellectually in my life ever since. I brought the question to Jorge More’ of Argonne National Laboratory, another prominent person in optimization, when I moved to Argonne from Cornell in 1994. We worked on a related problem called the molecular distance geometry problem, which assumes that a set of inter-atomic distances for the protein is given.

 

Afterwards, I stayed with Tera/Cray at Seattle and did some high-performance computing work for about a year, and then went back to Houston for about two years and worked with George Phillips, Richard Tapia, and Yin Zhang on the phase problem for protein structure determination, before I joined the faculty of Iowa State University in 2000. Indeed, I have moved around many places before I relatively stably settled in Iowa. During those years, my whole family shared all the excitements as well as the struggles of my “mobile life” with me. Without their enthusiastic support, I would have never been able to “move” on.