Dr. Cheng is a Full Professor of Engineering. Professor Cheng conducts research in the field of Wireless Communications and Signal Processing. Some of his recent works include Vehicular Networks for Smart Cities and Propagation modeling for challenging environments. His research and publications are widely referenced by researchers from academia and industry worldwide and were instrumental in forming the International Standard for Vehicular Networks. According to Google Scholar, Prof. Cheng is a top cited scholar among all Trinity Faculty. He also earned the Charles A. Dana Research Professorship from 2019 to 2021 for outstanding research.

Beyond classroom teaching, Professor Cheng supervised many undergraduate research projects that led to cutting-edge discoveries, resulting in a total of 18 peer-reviewed research papers co-authored with Trinity students, including a Best Paper Award.  Many students continued this passion for research to top graduate programs (such as MIT and Stanford) and their professional career. One of his recent graduate is building the hardware for autonomous driving vehicles at Intel. Another alumni is now at Tesla building clean-energy vehicles.

Professor Cheng contributed his time and expertise to professional societies such as IEEE and ECEDHA. He has served as an Associate Editor for a number of high impact journals, and as an expert reviewer for more than 200 manuscripts. He volunteered his time to the NSF sponsored ECEDHA's iREDEFINE program to mentor women and minority PhDs who possess an interest in academic careers.