​He obtained his Ph. D. in Neuroscience from the University of California at San Francisco in 1991 and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard from 1991 to 1994. He was on the faculty of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis from 1994 to 2004 and was the Elsa Swanson Professor of Neurology at Northwestern University School of Medicine from 2004 to 2007. 

His research interests include neurogenesis (from 1985 to 1996), axon guidance (1997 to 2008), and molecular biology of social interactions (2005 to present). He has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Neuroscience, Developmental Biology, Neuroscience Research, Developmental Brain Research, NeuroSignals, Faculty of 1000 and Neuroscience Bulletin. 

In 1998, he founded the Gordon Conference on Molecular and Cellular Neurobiology. He was awarded the Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral Fellowship, the John Merck Scholarship, the Esther A. and Joseph Klingenstein Neuroscience Fellowship and the Charles B. Wilson Scholarship in Brain Tumor Research. 

In 1999, he participated in the establishment of the Institute of Neuroscience of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). He served as a Co-Director of the Shanghai Institute for Advanced Studies of the CAS since 2002 to 2005 and as a Deputy Director of Academic Affairs of the National Institute of Biological Sciences (NIBS), Beijing from 2004 to 2009.