received my Ph.D. in Neuroscience in 1997 from the University of Sichuan in China. From 1997 to 2000, I worked as an associate professor at Shanghai Institute of Physiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in where I studied the structure and function of GABA receptors at retinal neurons. Then I worked as a Research Scientist at State University of New York at Stony Brook between 2000 and 2003 where I investigated GABAergic circuits in the retina. In late of 2003, I joined NINDS, as a research fellow, and developed a freeze-substitution method on retinal tissue for post-embedding immunogold EM that enables multiple glutamate receptors localization to be precisely examined at the ultrastructural level. In 2009, I worked as a Staff Scientist at Histopathology Core of National Eye Institute (NEI) where I studied eye diseases, such as AMD, retinal degeneration. Since late 2011, I return to NINDS and investigate the three dimensional structure of a complete retinal ribbon synapse using electron tomography and physiological methods.

Molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying synaptic transmission in the retinal circuits. Particularly, I focus on glutamatergic pathway in the retinal ribbon synapse by using a combination of anatomical, physiological, and imaging approaches. The second interesting area is retinal degeneration diseases focusing on cellular mechanisms and pathogenesis in the retina related disease. Currently I focus on age-related macular degeneration (AMD) and explore translational approaches to understanding and targeting cellular mechanisms in AMD.