He obtained his B.S. in computer engineering from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore in 2002 (transferred from Tsinghua University, China) and PhD in computer science from Boston University in 2007. His research focuses on the scalability, efficiency, and effectiveness issues, as well as security problems in database systems and big data management. He was a recipient for an NSF career award in 2011, two HP IRP awards in 2011 and 2012 respectively, a Google App Engine award in 2013, the IEEE ICDE best paper award in 2004, the IEEE ICDE 10+ Years Most Influential Paper Award in 2014, a Google Faculty award in 2015, and the SIGMOD Best Demonstration Award in SIGMOD 2015. He is/was the demo chair for VLDB 2014, general chair for SIGMOD 2014, PC area chair for ICDE 2014 and SIGMOD 2015, and associate editor for IEEE TKDE.