In 1988, he obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Science and Technology of China(USTC). He is currently a professor at USTC, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences(CAS), a fellow of the American Physical Society, and the vice-president of the Chinese Physical Society. He has previously worked at the Institute of High Energy Physics of the CAS, ETH Zurich in Switzerland, and the University of Michigan in the United States.

He has been engaged in particle physics experiments for a long time, mainly including: constructing an iron-free double-focusing b spectrometer to measure the mass of anti-electron neutrinos, building a bent crystal spectrometer to precisely measure the strong interaction effects on exotic π hydrogen and π deuterium atoms, conducting experiments with the Beijing Spectrometer at the Beijing Electron-Positron Collider, participating in the D0 experiment at the Fermilab Tevatron in the United States, and working on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

He has received several awards, such as the First Prize of Beijing Municipal Science and Technology, the Outstanding Scientific and Technological Achievement Prize of the CAS, the Second Prize of National Natural Science, and the Ho Leung Ho Lee Foundation Prize for Scientific and Technological Progress.

His current main research interests are: the ATLAS experiment at the LHC, R&D for the next-generation high-luminosity 2-7 GeV electron-positron collider (Super Tau-Charm Facility), and the search for magnetic monopoles and fractional charges.