He received his BSEE and MSEE degrees from Southeast University, Nanjing, China in 1994 and 1997 respectively. He then received his Ph.D. degree from Virginia Tech in 2001. He had worked at ABB from February 2001 to August 2005 as a Senior Engineer and then a Principal Engineer before becoming a faculty member at The University of Tennessee. His current interests include distributed energy and distribution systems, energy markets, wind power integration, power system optimization, reactive power and voltage stability, and power system reliability.