His research interests include physical and logic synthesis for high-performance low-power VLSI circuits, design and optimization of high-speed VLSI interconnects, and design, synthesis, and compilation for programmable/reconfigurable architectures. He has published over 180 research papers and led over 30 research projects in these areas. He served as the General Chair of the 1993 ACM/SIGDA Physical Design Workshop, the Program Chair and General Chair of the 1997 and 1998 Int'l Symp. on FPGAs, respectively, Program Co-Chair of the 1999 Int'l Symp. on Low-Power Electronics and Designs, Program Co-Chair of ASPDAC'2003, and on program committees of many major conferences, including DAC, ICCAD, and ISCAS. He is an Associate Editor of IEEE Trans. on VLSI Systems and ACM Trans. on Design Automation of Electronic Systems.

Dr. Cong received the Best Graduate Award from the Peking University in 1985, and the Ross J. Martin Award for Excellence in Research from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1989. He received the NSF Young Investigator Award in 1993, the Northrop Outstanding Junior Faculty Research Award from UCLA in 1993, the IEEE Trans. on CAD Best Paper Award in 1995 from IEEE CAS Society, and the ACM and SIGDA Meritorious Service Award in 1998. He received an SRC Inventor Recognition Award in 2000 and the SRC Technical Excellence Award for Year 2000. He was elected to an IEEE Fellow in 2000.