I was born in Beijing and grew up in Tianjin, China. I graduated from the Tianjin Nankai High School, which produced two Chinese prime ministers and numuerous scientists. I received my BS degree from Tsinghua University, Department of Electrical Engineering in 1996 and MS degree from Iowa State University Department of Electrical Engineering in 2000.

In early 2000 I started to work in a branch of GE Energy as an engineer. I was in a team to develop and customize software for power system controls and optimizations. The everyday work was C and Fortran programming. In mid 2001, my wife obtained her Ph.D. in genetics and started to work at The Jackson Laboratory at Maine. I quitted my job and moved with her.

From July 2001 to August 2005, I worked as a scientific software engineer at The Jackson Laboratory in Dr. Gary Churchill’s statistical genetics group. I learned a lot in those four years and was exposed to the fancinating world of genetic and genomic research. I developed and co-developed several software packages for QTL mapping and gene expression microarray data analysis during that time. See Software page for details. I became a senior software engineer in early 2005 and felt the learning curve was saturated as a scientific programmer. I had an urge to go back to graduate school and study math/statistics and biology in a systematical and rigorous way. My major career goal at that time was to find an academic position and conduct independent research on biostatistics/bioinformatics/computational biology.

My five-year Ph.D. study was full of struggle, depression, sleepless nights, as well as enjoyment. I obtained my Ph.D. degree in 2010, and fortunately found a tenure track faculty position at Emory. Since then I have been fully enjoying the academic freedom and intellectual challenges, and working on problems I’m interested in.

In my leisure time I listen to music and play some guitar. My favorite guitarist is Slash, so of course my favoriate band is G&R. I’m trying to learn many Slash’s solos. I like sports and enjoy watching American football (both college and the NFL). I enjoy running and go to gym regularly. I also play soccer and tennis a few times a week. Above all these, I especially enjoy playing tennis with my two boys (both are good athletes and way better than me), and watching them play in the tournaments.