[1] Much of her research concerns the computational simulation of nanostructures, including nanowires and nanotubes.
She is also a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration,[1] with whom she is a coauthor of highly cited work on binary black holes and the gravitational waves they emit.
After completing her undergraduate studies in 1981 at Fudan University, she went to Northwestern University for graduate study in physics, earning a master's degree in 1982 and completing her Ph.D. in 1988.
[7] In 2005, Cheng was elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), after a nomination from the APS Division of Computational Physics, "for insights from pioneering nanoscale simulations, notably on cluster phase transitions,surface melting, and nanocrystal-surface interactions, especially the interplay between structure and dynamics and between structure and conductance".
[8] In 2010, the University of Florida named Cheng as a UF Research Foundation Professor.