He received his PhD degree from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2008. Before joining NTU in 2009, he was a postdoctoral associate at the Cornell University. His research focuses on database management, especially on data privacy and spatial databases. He has published extensively and exclusively in the premier database conferences and journals, including ACM SIGMOD, VLDB, IEEE ICDE, ACM TODS, VLDB Journal, and IEEE TKDE. Several of his papers have received more than 100 citations in the past few years (according to Google Scholar). He was the winner of the 2009 Hong Kong Young Scientist Award in Physical/Mathematical Science (conferred by the Hong Kong Institute of Sicence) and the 2009 ACM-HK Prof. Francis Chin Research Award (conferred by the Hong Kong Chapter of the ACM).