Cheng Chu is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at George Mason University (GMU). He received his Ph.D. from Indiana University Bloomington in January 2026, where he was co-advised by Prof. Fan Chen and Prof. Lei Jiang. Prior to joining GMU, he was a postdoctoral researcher at North Carolina State University, working with Prof. Yuan Liu and Prof. Huiyang Zhou. He earned his M.S. and B.S. degrees from Hefei University of Technology in 2021 and 2018, respectively. His research focuses primarily on quantum computing, with an emphasis on quantum computer architecture, quantum system security, and quantum machine learning.

Cheng’s research has received the Best Paper Award, 3rd Place, at the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Quantum Computing and Engineering (QCE), and was selected as a Best Paper Finalist at the 2024 Design Automation Conference (DAC).

I am always open to research collaborations and happy to chat about potential research ideas.

I am currently looking for motivated students interested in quantum computer architecture, quantum system security, and quantum ML. If you are interested, please feel free to contact me at cchu9@gmu.edu.

News

• I joined North Carolina State University as a postdoctoral researcher. 02/2026
• I graduated from Indiana University Bloomington. 01/ 2026
• I defended my Ph.D. dissertation. 11/2025
• QNBAD: Quantum Noise-induced Backdoor Attacks against Zero Noise Extrapolation was accepted by NDSS 2026. 10/2025
• BVQC: A Backdoor-style Watermarking Scheme for Variational Quantum Circuits was accepted by QCE 2025. 07/2025
• LSTM-QGAN: Scalable NISQ Generative Adversarial Network was accepted by ICASSP 2025. 12/2024
• OFHE: An Electro-Optical Accelerator for Discretized TFHE was accepted by ISLPED 2024. 08/2024
• TITAN: A Distributed Large-Scale Trapped-Ion NISQ Computer was chosen as the best paper nominee by DAC 2024. 06/2024
• I won the Jose Blakeley PhD Summer Research Award ($4400) 05/2024
• TITAN: A Distributed Large-Scale Trapped-Ion NISQ Computer is accepted by DAC 2024. 02/2024

Honors and Awards

• 2024    DAC Best Paper Finalists
• 2024    61st DAC Young Fellow
• 2024    Jose Blakeley PhD Summer Research Award
• 2023    QCE Best Paper Award - 3rd Place