Before joining CS@Illinois in 2015, Jian was a postdoc in the Berger Lab at MIT, and a visiting scientist in the Lindquist Lab at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. He was a graduate student in the Xu Lab from 2007 and obtained his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago in 2013. He received his B.S. in Computer Science from Wuhan University, China. Jian worked on HIV protein analysis with Drs. David Heckerman and Jonathan Carlson in the eScience group at Microsoft Research in 2010.