He received Ph.D. from the University of California, Riverside, USA and his B. Eng (honors) from Zhejiang University, P.R. China, both in Computer Science. Before joining NTU, he was a research scientist at the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), National Library of Medicine (NLM), National Institutes of Health (NIH), USA. His research interests are Bioinformatics, Computational Systems Biology and Genomics, aiming to develop novel algorithms and in silico models to help answer biomedical questions (e.g. how are cell fate decided in cancer and stem cells). He has published in top-tier journals such as Nucleic Acids Research, Genome Biology, Molecular Biology & Evolution, Bioinformatics, PLoS Computational Biology, etc.