He received a Ph.D. from Brown University in 2009. Prior to that, he got his Bachelor's and Master's degrees from Tsinghua University and UC Davis, respectively, and worked in database companies Informix and IBM. From 2009 to 2011 he worked as an assistant professor at the University of Kentucky. His research areas are in data management, with topics including noisy and uncertain data, and data security and privacy. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award in 2012. He serves as a Program Committee member in major database and data mining conferences such as ICDE, VLDB, and ICDM.