Cheng Soon Ong is a senior principal research scientist at the Statistical Machine Learning Group, Data61, CSIRO, and is an Associate Science Director at Data61. He works on extending machine learning methods and enabling new approaches to scientific discovery, and has led the machine learning and artificial intelligence future science platform at CSIRO. He supervises and mentors many junior scientists, collaborates with scientists on problems in genomics and astronomy, advocates for open science, and is an adjunct Associate Professor at the Australian National University. He is co-author of the textbook Mathematics for Machine Learning, and his career has spanned multiple roles in Malaysia, Germany, Switzerland, and Australia.

His PhD in Computer Science was completed at the Australian National University in 2005. He was a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute of Biological Cybernetics and the Fredrich Miescher Laboratory in Tübingen, Germany. From 2008 to 2011, he was a lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at ETH Zurich, and in 2012 and 2013 he worked in the Diagnostic Genomics Team at NICTA in Melbourne. Since 2014, Cheng Soon is researching ways to enable scientific discovery by extending statistical machine learning methods with the Machine Learning Research Group in Data61, CSIRO in Canberra. Prior to his PhD, he researched and built search engine and Bahasa Malaysia technologies at Mimos Berhad, Malaysia. He obtained his B.E. (Information Systems) and B.Sc. (Computer Science) from the University of Sydney, Australia.