Cheng is originally from
Hefei, where she was born in 1983. She graduated from the
University of Science and Technology of China in 2003, and earned a master's degree in
applied mathematics at
Brown University in 2004. She completed her Ph.D. at Brown in 2007. Her dissertation,
Discontinuous Galerkin Methods for Hamilton–Jacobi Equations and Equations with Higher Order Derivatives, was supervised by
Chi-Wang Shu. After postdoctoral research with
Irene M. Gamba at the
University of Texas at Austin, she joined
Michigan State University as an assistant professor of mathematics in 2011. She was promoted to associate professor in 2016 and full professor in 2021. In 2023 she was the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation Visiting Professor at
Uppsala University in Sweden, and moved to her present position as a professor of mathematics at Virginia Tech, affiliated with the Computational Modeling & Data Analytic Program. ==Recognition==