Ning Xu is a professor in Department of Physics, Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at the Microscale, and CAS Key Laboratory of Soft Matter Chemistry at University of Science and Technology of China. Ning received his Ph.D. from Department of Mechanical Engineering at Yale University under the supervision of Prof. Corey O'Hern. After that, Ning worked with Prof. Andrea Liu at University of Pennsylvania and Prof. Sidney Nagel at University of Chicago as a postdoctoral fellow. Before joining in the faculty at USTC in early 2010, Ning spent half a year in Department of Physics at the Chinese University of Hong Kong as a research assistant professor.