Before joining SDU, he worked at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne as a postdoctoral researcher. He obtained his PhD in Computer Science at the National University of Singapore. He also held several visiting positions at various international institutes, including the University of Maryland College Park, the Advanced Digital Sciences Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and INRIA Rennes. His research interests span database systems and distributed systems. His recent research focuses on scalable streaming data processing and graph data processing. He has published over 50 research articles in international journals and conference proceedings.