The former president of e-commerce giant JD.Com’s Artificial Intelligence Research Institute has been appointed a tenured professor at Chinese leading university Tsinghua University.

Bowen Zhou will teach at the Department of Electronic Engineering at Tsinghua University, the institution announced on its official WeChat account today.

Zhou, an expert in AI who published many academically-influential articles, joined JD.Com as founding dean of the AI Research Institute in 2017. Since then, he held many positions including senior vice president of the institute and chairman of JD.Com’s technical committee.

After he left the company in November last year, they were circulating many rumors claiming he was going to start a new business.

Before working at JD.Com, Zhou held several leadership positions during his 15 years at multinational technology corporation IBM, including president of the Thomas J. Watson Research Center at IBM’s headquarters in New York.

Editor: Guo Lili