He received his medical degrees (M.B./M.D.) from Hunan Medical University (now Xiang Yia Medical School, Central South University) in China. He then completed a clinical pharmacology fellowship between 2000 and 2002 in the University of California San Francisco, where he later received his PhD degree in Pharmaceutical Sciences & Pharmacogenomics in 2006. He worked at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center at Los Angeles as a faculty scientist in 2007. He joined the University of Maryland at Baltimore in 2008.