Professor Zhi Quan (George) Zhou is an accomplished scholar-practitioner whose career spans academia and industry. He received his PhD in Software Engineering from The University of Hong Kong. He is currently a Professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC). Prior to joining UNNC, he was a tenured Associate Professor at the University of Wollongong in Australia, served as Director of Test Development at Alibaba and Ant Group, and as a Senior Expert in Safety and Security and Head of the Software Security Tools Department at NIO Inc., a leading global manufacturer of premium smart electric vehicles.

Professor Zhou is a founding pioneer of the discipline of metamorphic testing and authored the world's very first PhD thesis on this subject. Years later, metamorphic testing was officially incorporated into the ISO/IEC/IEEE 29119-4 International Standard in 2021. He co-founded the ICSE International Workshop on Metamorphic Testing in 2016.

Professor Zhou's work has been widely reported by international media, including Nature. He has received many honors reflecting his global and national impact, including the prestigious Virtual Earth Award from Microsoft Research headquarters in Redmond, USA, the Researcher of the Year Gold Disruptor Award from the Australian Computer Society, and a top-level national award from China. He is a science advisor to the Hong Kong SAR Government, and an International Reader for the Australian Research Council.

Professor Zhou's research interests and professional expertise include software engineering (in particular, software testing and analysis), quality engineering for AI-based systems, cybersecurity, autonomous driving safety, LLM-assisted static analysis of software requirements and code, and AI-enabled technical approaches to assisting enterprises with compliance auditing. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed papers in reputable venues, including IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, Communications of the ACM, and ACM Computing Surveys. He drove the industrial-grade software delivery and market launch of production vehicles.

Prospective students wishing to pursue Master's or PhD studies in Professor Zhou's research areas are welcome to contact him directly via George.Zhou@nottingham.edu.cn.

Google Scholar page:

https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=UHimbpIAAAAJ