He is the founding Director of the Alexandra Navrotsky Institute for Experimental Thermodynamics (AlexInstitute) and an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Chemistry, Materials Science & Engineering Program and the Institute for Nuclear Science and Technology at WSU. He earned his B.S. from Zhejiang University, China in 2006, M.S. from the University of Akron in 2008, and Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis in 2012, all in Chemical Engineering. He was also a postdoctoral fellow at the Peter A. Rock Thermochemistry Laboratory and NEAT ORU at the University of California, Davis from 2013 to 2016. His research interests include physics and chemistry of material surfaces, catalysis, porous material synthesis, nanogeoscience and nanotechnology.