Lionel M. Ni earned the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from National Taiwan University in 1973, the M.S. degree in electrical and computer engineering from Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, in 1977, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, in 1980. He is Chair Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at HKUST. He served as the Department Head from 2002 to 2008. He also serves as the Special Assistant to the President, Dean of HKUST Fok Ying Tung Graduate School, and Director of HKUST China Ministry of Education/Microsoft Research Asia IT Key Lab. He was the Chief Scientist of the National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program) on Wireless Sensor Networks. Prior to coming to HKUST, Professor Ni was a full Professor in Computer Science and Engineering at Michigan State University where he had stayed from 1981 to 2002.  He was co-founder and CEO of CC&T Technologies, Inc. (1998-2001).  He has directed 54 Ph.D. students to completion and has published over 100 refereed journal articles and over 200 refereed conferences papers in the areas of pervasive computing, mobile computing, big data, sensor networks, parallel architectures, distributed systems, high-speed networks, VLSI design automation, fault tolerant computing, and parallel compilers. His research papers have been highly cited for over 19,000 times according to Google Scholar. He is the owner of 7 US/China patents with more than 15 patents pending.

He co-authored (with Jose Duato and Sudhakar Yalamanchili) the book "Interconnection Networks: An Engineering Approach" in 1997 by IEEE Computer Society Press. The second edition of this book was published by Morgan Kaufmann in 2002. His second book "Smart Phone and Next Generation Mobile Computing" (with Pei Zheng) was published in 2006 also by Morgan Kaufmann. His third book "Professional Microsoft Smartphone Programming" (with Baijian Yang and Pei Zheng) was published by Wrox in 2007.

Dr. Ni is serving on the editorial board of Communications of the ACM, ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks, and International Journal of Pervasive Computing and Communications. He is Executive Editor-in-Chief of Frontiers of Computer Science (Springer and Higher Education Press). He had served as an IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Visitor from 1985 to 1988, an editor for IEEE Transactions on Computers from 1992 to 1996, an editor for IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems from 1993 to 1997, a subject area editor for the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing from 1987 to 1994, an editor of Journal of Information and Science and Engineering from 1996 to 2002, a program evaluator for the Computer Sciences Accreditation Commission from 1989 to 1993, a member of the IEEE Computer Society Fellow Evaluation Committee from 1996 to 1998, and 2005, chair of the 1998 IEEE/ACM Eckert-Mauchly Award (the most prestigious award in the computer architecture field) Committee, and the program director of the U.S. National Science Foundation Microelectronic Systems Architecture Program from 1995 to 1996.

Dr. Ni holds guest or adjunct positions at Chinese Academy of Sciences, Fudan University, XinJiang University, Beihang University, University of Science and Technology of China, Hunan University, China Ocean University, and Asia University. He is a visiting chair professor at Shanghai Jiaotong University, a visiting chair professor at Tsing Hua University (Beijing), and an honorary chair professor at  National Tsinghua University (Hsinchu).  He was the founding director of Institute of Advanced Computing and Digital Engineering, Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

He is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery and IEEE. He was elevated to the rank of fellow of IEEE in 1994 for his contributions to parallel processing and distributed systems. He served as conference chairs or co-chairs of over 20 conferences, such as ICPP 2005, ICEBE 2007, ICPADS 2007, Percom 2008, and Infocom 2011. He served as program chairs or co-chairs of over 10 conferences, such as COMPSAC 1991, HPCA 1997, ICCCN 1997, and ICPP 2001.  He has delivered over 30 invited keynote speeches at national and international conferences. He received the Outstanding Paper Awards at the 1992 International Conference on Parallel Processing (with his former student, Arun Nanda), at the 1992 International Symposium on Computer Architecture (with his former student, Chris Glass), at the 1996 International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems (with his formal student, Y.H. Liu, Dr. P. Dantzig, and Dr. C.E. Wu), at the 1996 International Conference on Parallel Processing (with his former student Natawut Nupairoj, Dr. Julie Park, and Dr. H.A. Choi), at the 2005 IEEE International Conference on e-Business Engineering (with his formal student, Yanmin Zhu, Dr. C. Hu, Prof. J. Huai and Dr. Yunhao Liu), at the 2008 IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (with his student Yunhuai Liu and Dr. Qian Zhang), at the 2012 International Conference on Mobile Ad-hoc and Sensor Networks (with Ruobing Jiang, Yanmin Zhu, and Xin Wang), and  at the 2012 IEEE International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems (with Jiang Xiao, Kaishun Wu, Youwen Yi, and Lu Wang). In 1998, his paper “The Turn Model for Adaptive Routing” (co-authored with his former Ph.D. student, Chris Glass) published at the 19th Annual ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Computer Architecture was selected as one of the 41 most significant impact papers in the last 25 years in computer architecture area. He won the Michigan State University Distinguished Faculty Award in 1994; the Overseas Outstanding Contribution Award from China Computer Federation in 2009; the First Class Award in Natural Sciences for Research Excellence by the Ministry of Education, China in 2010; and the Second Class Award in Natural Sciences forResearch Excellence by the State Council, China in 2011.