Qiaozhu Mei is a Professor of Information and the Associate Dean for Research and Innovation at the University of Michigan. He served as the founding director of the Master of Applied Data Science program, one of the first online degree programs at the University of Michigan. Prior to joining Michigan, he received his PhD degree from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Bachelor's degree from Peking University. Dr. Mei’s research is broadly focused on AI, data mining, information retrieval, machine learning, and natural language processing. His work centers on developing novel techniques for analyzing large-scale text, social and information networks, and behavioral data. These techniques are applied to solving problems in Web search, Web mining, social computing, health informatics, and other domains with the aim to generate a positive impact on everyone’s daily life.