She is interested in microbiome studies, protein bioinformatics, and biological pathway analysis and reconstruction. Her research in metagenomics centers on the development of new algorithms and tools for data mining in microbiome studies. She earned her Ph.D. in computational biology from Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China in 2001, and then pursued postdoctoral studies at the Burnham Institute for Medical Research from 2001 to 2004. She was a Research Assistant Professor at the same institute before she joined IU in 2007. She received an NSF CAREER award in 2009.