He received his Ph.D. in the history of science from USTC in 2002. From December 2004 to November 2006, he was Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg. In 2008, he was Andrew Mellon Research Fellow at the Needham Research Institute, Cambridge, and in 2013 was a visiting professor at The Cluster of Excellence "Asia and Europe in a Global Context: The Dynamics of Transculturality" at Heidelberg University. Broadly speaking, his research interest lies in the history of knowledge exchange between China and the west. In recent years, he has focused on European astronomy in China.