Rate My Professor Cheng-Wei Qiu

Cheng-Wei Qiu is Provost's Chair Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the National University of Singapore (NUS), within the Faculty of Engineering. He holds fellowships from the Academy of Engineering Singapore, the American Physical Society, Optica, SPIE, and The Electromagnetics Academy. Qiu received his B.Eng. degree from the University of Science and Technology of China in 2003 and his Ph.D. from NUS in 2007. He completed postdoctoral research as a Fellow in the Physics Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before joining NUS as an Assistant Professor in December 2009. He was promoted to Associate Professor in January 2017 and to Dean's Chair Professor in January 2018, later advancing to his current Provost's Chair Professorship. His research focuses on structured light, beam manipulation, and interfacial optics, with over 460 peer-reviewed publications in journals including Nature, Science, Light: Science & Applications, and eLight. He has been recognized as a Highly Cited Researcher by Web of Science for multiple consecutive years and has received numerous awards, including the SUMMA Graduate Fellowship in Advanced Electromagnetics (2005), IEEE AP-S Graduate Research Award (2006), URSI Young Scientist Award (2008), NUS Young Investigator Award (2011), MIT TR35@Singapore Award (2012), Young Scientist Award from the Singapore National Academy of Science (2013), SPIE Rising Researcher Award (2018), NUS Engineering Researcher Award (2021), World Scientific Medal from the Institute of Physics Singapore (2021), Achievement in Asia Award (Robert T. Poe Prize) from the International Organization of Chinese Physicists and Astronomers (2023), and the 2026 Joseph Fraunhofer Award/Robert M. Burley Prize. Qiu serves as co-Editor-in-Chief of eLight and has held editorial roles with Light: Science & Applications, Laser & Photonics Reviews, Advanced Optical Materials, ACS Photonics, PhotoniX, and Photonics Research. He also directs the Optical Science and Engineering Center at NUS.