He received B.S. degrees in Biological Sciences and Computer Sciences from Tsinghua University in 1996 and M.S. degrees in Physiology, Electrical Engineering, and Mathematics all from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). He then received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from UIUC in 2004 with a focus on computer vision and machine learning. His research interests include computational biology, bioinformatics, bioimage informatics, and machine learning. He has co-authored more than 110 research papers.