Ya Cheng received his B.S. degree from Fudan University in 1993 and Ph.D. degree from the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1998. He is currently a professor at the School of Physics and Electronic Science, East China Normal University. He has made important contributions to the development and applications of ultrafast laser nonlinear optics and laser micromachining technology. He invented the “slit beam shaping” technique for writing 3D photonic circuits in glass which is now widely adopted by the femtosecond laser micromachining community. He also developed the photolithography assisted chemo-mechanical etching technique for fabricating low-loss lithium niobate photonic integrated circuits, which has enabled realization of large scale, ultra-low loss integrated photonic systems in a scalable and cost-effective manner. He has co-authored more than 200 peer-reviewed papers which have been cited more than 10,000 times as indicated in the Web of Science Core Collection. He has given more than 100 invited talks (including plenary and keynote talks) at various international conferences. He also serves as the co-chair or committee/sub-committee member of many international conferences including CLEO, CLEO Europe, CLEO Pacific Rim, ICALEO (USA), Photonics West, ICPEPA, Laser precision microprocessing (LPM), etc. He is an Optica Fellow and a Fellow of Institute of Physics, UK.