Eddie Cheng completed his doctorate in Combinatorics and Optimization in 1995. His thesis was on polyhedral aspects of the optimal stable set problem, supervised by Bill Cunningham. After holding an Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) postdoctoral fellowship at Rice University, he joined the Mathematics and Statistics Department at Oakland University in 1997.
Eddie's research interests include combinatorial optimization, integer programming and network analysis. He has published over one hundred papers in these areas, and is associate editor of Networks and a number of other scholarly journals.
Eddie has an outstanding record in getting young people involved in mathematical research. For several years he was director of the Michigan High School Mathematics competition. For more than ten years, he has served as director of Oakland's Summer Mathematics Institute, a six-week summer program that allows exceptional high school students in Southeastern Michigan the chance to earn college math credits. He has mentored nineteen high school students over the years, leading to many awards at prestigious science fairs and fourteen refereed publications.
Eddie has a strong record of administrative service at Oakland. Since 2010 he has been Chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics.
In addition to all of this, Eddie is an outstanding teacher as well as a successful graduate student advisor. In 2007, he was the winner of the Mathematical Association of America Michigan Section Distinguished Teacher Award. He also received the 2009 Professor of the Year Award from the Presidents' Council of State Universities of Michigan.
In 2011 Eddie was designated a Distinguished Professor at Oakland University. In the history of the university, only sixteen faculty members have received this honour, and Eddie is by far the youngest ever to do so.