He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of California, Los Angeles in 2005, M.S. in Pattern Recognition and Intelligence System from Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2000, and B.S. in Computer Science from University of Science and Technology of China in 1997. Dr. Cao is the director of the Graphics and Visualization Lab at Virginia Tech, which focuses on the research of high performance visualization and simulation, parallel computing on many-core architecture, character animation, and video game based learning.