Chi-Ren Shyu received the B.S. degree with honors in Electrical Engineering from the Feng-Chia University, Taichung, Taiwan, in 1990, M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, in 1994 and Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, in 1999. After one-year post-doctoral training as a research associate at Purdue, Dr. Shyu joined the Department of Computer Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Missouri - Columbia (UMC) in October 2000. Currently he is an assistant professor of the Department of Computer Science.
Dr. Shyu's research covers a wide range of multi-disciplinary areas in content management and retrieval from large-scale databases, particularly in geospatial and biomedicine. Dr. Shyu directs the Medical and Biological Digital Library Research Laboratory (MedBio Lab) at UMC and supervises ten doctoral students. Over the past five years at UMC, Dr. Shyu and his students have made significant contributions in both theoretical development and applied sciences. The MedBio Lab developed several new image database index structures, Statistical KD-tree, SKD-Metric tree, and Entropy Balanced SKD-tree, for accurate and efficient image database retrieval in high-dimensional space. Dr. Shyu's Lab launched the first in the world real-time protein tertiary structure retrieval system ProteinDBS which was recognized by the September 3, 2004 Science Magazine. It takes user's protein structure with unknown function and retrieves similar structures from a database of 73,000 structures in seconds with high retrieval precision, while other existing systems normally take hours or even days to response to a query. Currently, Dr. Shyu is a PI for an NGA University Research Initiatives (NURI) project (2004-2007).
In total, Dr. Shyu has directly participated in approximately $3.2M of funded research ($1.1M PI and $2.1M Co-PI/Co-I) over his academic career. Dr. Shyu has accomplished this through a combination of single-investigator efforts and multi-disciplinary research collaborations. Dr. Shyu has received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2005), College of Engineering Junior Faculty Research Award (2005), five Teaching Awards (2001-2005), and Faculty Performance Award (2001).