He received his BE degree in mechanical engineering from Xi'an Highway University (currently Chang An University), China, earning his Master of Science and PhD degrees from Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), China, respectively. Both MS and PhD degrees are in applied mechanics. He joined the Department of Mechanics and worked there as a lecturer until 1995. After spending ten years lecturing at HUST, he was awarded a DAAD/K.C. Wong research fellowship in 1994, which enabled him to work at the University of Stuttgart in Germany for nine months. In 1995 he left HUST to take up a postdoctoral research fellowship at Tsinghua University, China, where he worked until 1997. He worked as a Queen Elizabeth II fellowship in 1997 at the University of Sydney and a Professorial fellowship at the Australian National University in 2004, both sponsored  by the Australian Research Council, and is currently a Professor in the Research School of Engineering at the Australian National University, Australia. He has published over 380 journal papers and 8 monographs.