He obtained the Bachelor degree in physics and mathematics from the Seoul National University in 2003 , and continued his Phd in atomic physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he was awarded the Samsung graduate fellowship in 2004-2009. Since 2010, he has been a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley before he joined the physics department at HKUST in 2013. He is also the recipient of the AKPA Outstanding Young Researcher Award (OYRA) in 2013 and the Early Career Award from the Research Grant Council of Hong Kong in 2014.