He has a PhD in water resources engineering from Dalian University of Technology, China. Before joining Exeter he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Bristol and Imperial College London. His research focuses on conducting fundamental and applied research at the interface between water systems and decision making by combining simulation, optimization, and analytics tools to tackle water management problems. He has published over 100 journal and conference papers and won a number of awards including the prestigious ASCE ‘Quentin Martin Best Practice Oriented’ research paper award in 2014.