His research interests lie in computational optimization and its applications in image processing, machine learning, medical imaging, and other inverse problems. He received his B.S. in mathematics from Nanjing University in 2001, and then M.S. and Ph.D. in operations research from Columbia University in 2003 and 2006, respectively. Since 2006, he has been with Rice University. He won NSF CAREER award in 2008 and Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in 2009. His recent work has been in optimization algorithms for large-scale and distributed signal processing and machine learning problems.