Wenfei Fan is a computer scientist who has made fundamental contributions to both theory and practice of data management. He has both formalised the problems of querying big data and has developed radically new techniques that overcome the limits associated with conventional database systems.  His work has been adopted in the telecommunications industry for analyzing massive data sets that defied their current technology.

In addition, Wenfei has made seminal contributions to data quality, in which he devised new techniques for data cleaning that have found wide commercial adoption.  He has also contributed to our  understanding of semi-structured data.

Wenfei is a recipient of the Roger Needham Award in 2008 (UK), the Outstanding Overseas Young Scholar Award in 2003 (China), the Career Award in 2001 (USA).  He is the recipient of a number of awards from leading database conferences. He is a fellow of the ACM and a member of Academia Europaea.