He received his doctorate degree in chemistry in 1984 from the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD, where he worked on beta-lactam antibiotic biosynthesis. After his postdoctoral training in protein chemistry at Rockefeller University in New York, he taught medicinal chemistry at the State University of New York at Buffalo and biochemistry at Wright State University in Daytin, OH. He has worked in various areas, including the protein chemistry and structure function relationships of protein kinases, G-proteins, Pasteurella multocida toxin, and other bacterial protein toxins. He is currently also a Jinshan Scholar at Fujian Agriculture and Forestry in Fuzhou, China.