He received his PhD from Chinese Academy of Sciences. Before joining OSU in 2008, he was a research faculty at University of Nebraska for many years. His primary research interest lies in the molecular mechanisms of all forms of defense responses in plants that target virus pathogens. His current research focuses primarily on the following two major anti-viral defenses of plants: RNA silencing targeting viruses and nonhost anti-viral resistance. In addition, he is also interested in unraveling the molecular mechanism of super-infection exclusion that exclude later arriving individuals of a virus from the cells already containing the same virus. He is also actively involved in a number of collaborative projects that use virus-induced gene silencing as a tool for functional genomics in soybean, maize, and other crop plants.