Chung-Kang Peng

Chung-Kang Peng is a statistical physicist and Co-Director of the Rey Institute for Nonlinear Dynamics in Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, which is major teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School. He is Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School, currently on leave from Harvard to serve as the Founding Dean of the College of Health Sciences and Technology, and K.-T. Li Chair Professor of the National Central University. He is also Distinguished Professor at the Yuan Ze University in Taiwan and Visiting Professor at the Peking University in China. Also, he is one of the founding members of the PhysioNet. sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. He has over 200 articles in print which carry an h-index of 64.

Peng invented several popular computational algorithms for time series analysis, including Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA). The original paper which introduced the DFA technique has been cited over 2000 times as of 2013. Peng and his colleagues have developed an algorithm, called information-based similarity analysis (IBS), to distinguish heart rate time series of healthy subjects from diseased patients. The IBS algorithm was later applied by Peng and his collaborators to investigate the origin of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) virus, and to study the authorship debate about William Shakespeare’s plays. His work on the analysis of Shakespeare’s plays won him the 2003 Calvin & Rose Hoffman Prize.

Current projects include a bid in the Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE, where he is a leading a team from Taiwan for the contest On December 12th, 2016 The XPRIZE foundation announced that Dynamical Biomarkers Group, the team led by Dr. Peng, has been selected as finalists.