Cong Zhang was raised in the city of Zhengzhou in Henan province, China — home of the famous Shaolin Temple. He received his Master’s degree in computing science from Zhengzhou University, one of the top universities in China.

As a high achiever in China, he was eligible to apply to a number of universities around the world. He chose SFU, partly because the university has been designated a preferred destination for Chinese graduate students.

These days, Cong can be found working hard in the Multimedia and Wireless Networking Group under the supervision of Dr. Jiangchuan Liu. His research focus is on graphics processing and cloud computing.

He explains,"The main function of graphical processing units is to render 2D/3D images, videos and games, but for the right workloads, they can also process scientific computing in a high-performance parallel structure." While his main focus is to optimize the power of computers in cloud computing, he's also fascinated by computing loads in social networking applications such as microblogs.

We'd like to congratulate Cong on being a deserving recipient of this year's China Scholarship Council-SFU Graduate Scholarship, a joint-funding program to support selected PhD students from China. We're pleased to welcome him to Simon Fraser University and congratulate him on receiving this impressive award.

He began his PhD research in the School of Computing Science at SFU a few months ago. He describes his first impressions of those first few days: "This August, I first set foot on Vancouver soil and was attracted by the delightful environment and harmonious Simon Fraser University. I still remember the sweet sound of seagulls when I took the Skytrain from Vancouver International Airport to the Waterfront SkyTrain station."

• Linkedin: Cong Zhang
  
• School of Computing Science, SFU
• Mulltimedia and Wireless Networking Group
• SFU-China Scholarship Council Agreement