He received bachelor's degrees in Chemistry and Economics, and a master's degree in Chemistry from Peking University, and a Ph.D. in Biophysics from Harvard University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California. His graduate studies focused on wet-chemistry approaches to fabricating aligned single wall carbon nanotubes and the biophysical analysis of dynamic processes in living cells using high time resolution, spatial precision and chemical selectivity strategies. As a postdoctoral fellow he established a unique biological system for controlled expression of tagged proteins for single-molecule counting and localization using super resolution imaging based on PALM and STORM principles. He investigated the oncogenic processes and intracellular trafficking of Ras-GTP dimer formation and Raf activation.