Wenfei Fan
Wenfei Fan () is a Chinese-British computer scientist and professor of web data management at the University of Edinburgh. His research investigates database theory and database systems. Education Fan was educated at Peking University (BS, MS) and the University of Pennsylvania where he was awarded a PhD in Computer Science for research supervised by Peter Buneman and Scott Weinstein in 1999. Career and research After his Ph.D. in 1999, he remained in the USA but joined University of Edinburgh in 2004 as a Reader. In 2006, he became Professor of Web Data Management at the university. Fan has made fundamental contributions to both theory and practice of data management. He has both formalised the problems of querying big data and has developed radically new techniques that overcome the limits associated with conventional database systems. His work has been adopted in the telecommunications industry for analyzing massive data sets that defied their current technology. In addition, Fan has made seminal contributions to data quality, in which he devised new techniques for data cleaning that have found wide commercial adoption. He has also contributed to our understanding of semi-structured data. Awards and honors Fan won the Roger Needham Award in 2008 and