Cecilia Cheong Yin Mei (PhD) is an Associate Professor in the English Language Department, Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, Universiti Malaya. She is currently the Deputy Dean of Undergraduate Studies, overseeing 9 undergraduate programmes. She was formerly the Faculty's Head of Multimedia Planning Unit, where she headed a few committees.  Her research interests include (Critical) Genre Analysis, Multimodal Discourse Analysis, English for Specific Purposes, and Communication and Professional Discourse.   She has been a Principal Investigator of various research projects, particularly involving the study of various professional genres and multimodal texts and discourses.  She was a Co-Investigator of the University’s Research Grant sub-programme on Health Tourism in Malaysia; the Malaysian Ministry of Higher Education’s Strategic Plan for the Development of English Language at Public Higher Education Institutions; and West Chester University, USA’s Research and Creative Activities (RACA) project on the meaning of ‘quality’ in online courses at a Malaysian university.  She is currently the Principal Investigator (UM) and Consultant of Universitas Medan Indonesia's International Grant project on the analysis of communicative competence of air navigation students of Medan Aviation Polytechnic based on the Indonesian Aviation Curriculum. 

Cecilia has supervised postgraduate students' research to completion, and currently supervises several PhD and Masters students’ research on Critical Genre Analysis, English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and Multimodality.  She has taught ESL and EFL for thirty years at various levels, from secondary school to university and adult learners.  Courses and workshops she conducts include genre and discourse analysis, applied linguistics and Language for Specific Purposes.  She is also the faculty Coordinator of Epigeum UK's English for Academic Studies programme.  Cecilia used to sit on the University's e-Learning Committee where she conducted various workshops on the use of ICT and the use of Moodle’s Spectrum platform for teaching and learning purposes, and e-learning courses at her faculty; and was the faculty Coordinator of Online Distance Learning (ODL).  In recognition of her excellent work service, she was awarded the Excellence Service Award in 2000, 2005, 2015 and 2021; Certificate of Excellence Service in 2014 and 2016; Certificate of Faculty Excellent Services in 2020; and Best Postgraduate Supervisor Award in 2021 respectively.

Currently, she is the Deputy Head of the University's Student Holistic Empowerment (Cluster 4) courses, and the Open and Distance Learning Programmes Coordinator of her Faculty, responsible for setting up and overseeing the implementation of ODL academic programmes.  Cecilia is also an Associate Fellow of UM's Quality Management & Enhancement Centre (QMEC) as a UM Quality Excellence Index (UMQEI) Assessor and Program Quality Assurance Expert (ProQAE) since 2018, where she is actively involved in the implementation of Outcome Based Education, conducting workshops on the creation of new academic programmes based on OBE, and headed panels of assessors for the (re-)accreditation of academic programmes at the University.

At the national level, Cecilia is the Vice President and Secretary (overseeing) of the Malaysian Association of Applied Linguistics (MAAL) which is affiliated with the International Association of Applied Linguistics (Association Internationale de Linguistique, AILA). She is Co-Chairperson of the Steering Committee that organised the very successful international 21st AILA World Congress 2024 (11-16 August 2024 at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia), which also celebrated the 60th Anniversary of AILA that was attended by over 1,800 scholars and researchers in Applied Linguistics from around the world. Cecilia is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Malaysian English Language Teaching Association (MELTA)'s The English Teacher journal, and also sits on the editorial board of the ASEAN Journal of Applied Linguistics (ASJAL) journal, and an external reviewer for WOS/ISI-indexed journals, the Language Teaching Research, Sage Open, Journal of Marketing for Higher Education and Journal of Psycholinguistic Research; and Scopus-indexed journals, Pertanika’s Journal of Social Sciences & Humanities (JSSH) and GEMA Journal of Language Studies; and many other MyCite and peer-reviewed journals. She is also a certified trainer of the Human Resource Development Corporation Malaysia (HRD Corp).