Tao Cheng received the B.S. degree in geographic information system from Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, China, in 2003, the M. E. degree in photogrammetry and remote sensing from Peking University, Beijing, China, in 2006 and the Ph.D. degree in earth & atmospheric sciences from University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, in 2010. From January 2011 to December 2013, he was a Postdoctoral Scholar with the Department of Land, Air and Water Resources, University of California, Davis, CA, United States. Since December 2013, he has been a Professor of remote sensing and smart agriculture with the National Engineering & Technology Center for Information Agriculture (NETCIA) and College of Agriculture, Nanjing Agricultural University. He is currently the Associate Dean of NETCIA. His research is focused on spectral sensing of crop growth, crop disease/pest detection and prediction, quantitative retrieval of crop traits, and crop type/management mapping.

    He is the author of more than 100 papers on international and national journals, including 11 papers on Remote Sensing of Environment (RSE) as the first or corresponding author. He is the principal investigator of several national level projects funded by the National Key R&D Program of China and the National Natural Science Foundation of China. Dr. Cheng has been serving as an Associate Editor for IEEE JSTARS and an Editorial Board member for Precision Agriculture since 2021. He was elected to IEEE Senior Member in 2016 and was Chair of IEEE GRSS Nanjing Chapter from 2016-2020. He was a recipient of the Youth Science & Technology Award from the Crop Science Society of China in 2019 and recognized as a 2021 RSE Best Reviewer.