Dr Cheng's research background is in bioinformatics, molecular and evolutionary biology, with a PhD degree from Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He subsequently joined Yale-NUS College as a postdoctoral fellow, and is currently a research fellow in A/Prof Federico Lauro’s team at SCELSE.

Dr Cheng focuses on microbially influenced corrosion (MIC), integrating laboratory experiments with metagenomics and metatranscriptomics data mining.