Before joining UIUC, he was a visiting research scientist at Facebook AI Research, and was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University. He obtained PhD in electrical engineering from University of Minnesota, and B.S. in mathematics from Peking University. He has won the second place of INFORMS George Nicholson student paper competition, and honorable mention of INFORMS optimization society student paper competition. His research interests lie on optimization, machine learning and signal processing, especially large-scale optimization and non-convex optimization for machine learning.