She received her B.S. in chemical physics at the University of Science and Technology of China, and Ph.D. in chemistry, supervised by Prof. Ruben Gonzalez, at Columbia University. She then joined Prof. Taekjip Ha’s group as a postdoctoral fellow in the NSF Center for the Physics of Living Cells at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. At The University of Chicago, her research has been focused on RNA-mediated gene regulations, including trans-acting small regulatory RNAs in bacterial systems, and RNA internal modifications in eukaryotic systems, with the development and application of new imaging methods. In addition to the New Innovator award, she was selected for one of the Searle Scholars in 2017.