Wei Wang

Computer Science Department Chair

Wei Wang is a professor of the Computer Science Department and serves as its chair, effective July 1, 2025, at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. She holds the Leonard Kleinrock Term Chair in Computer Science and has a joint faculty appointment in the Department of Computational Medicine, which is affiliated with both the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine and UCLA Samueli.

At UCLA, Wang directs the Scalable Analytics Institute, which develops tools and techniques to analyze large datasets. Her research interests include big data analytics, data mining, machine learning, natural language processing, bioinformatics and computational biology, computational medicine and AI for science. She is also a member of UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, the Institute for Quantitative and Computational Biology, and the Bioinformatics Interdepartmental Ph.D. program.

Wang is a fellow of both the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). She has won numerous awards and has been recognized for her leadership in the data analytics field by both the IEEE International Conference on Data Mining and the ACM Special Interest Group on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, where she currently serves as chair. As of 2025, she has advised more than 45 graduate students and many postdoctoral researchers.

Prior to joining the UCLA Samueli faculty in 2012, Wang was a computer science professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She earned her doctorate in computer science from UCLA Samueli after completing her master’s in systems science at Binghamton University in New York. Before joining UNC-Chapel Hill, Wang worked as a research staff member at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center.