Wenfei Fan's current research interests include database theory and systems, in particular big data, data quality, data integration, distributed query processing, query languages, recommender systems , social network analysis and web services.

Wenfei Fan is the Chair of Web Data Management in the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, UK.  He is a Fellow of the ACM, USA, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, UK, a National Professor of the 1000-Talent Program and a Yangtze River Scholar, China.  He received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, and his MS and BS from Peking University.  He is a recipient of the Alberto O. Mendelzon Test-of-Time Award of ACM PODS 2010, the Best Paper Award for VLDB 2010, the Roger Needham Award in 2008, the Best Paper Award for ICDE 2007, the Outstanding Overseas Young Scholar Award in 2003, the Best Paper of the Year Award for Computer Networks in 2002, and the Career Award in 2001 (USA).