Born in Anhui in 1963. From 1979 to 1985, he studied in the Department of Mathematics of University of Science and Technology of China and obtained bachelor's and master's degrees respectively. In 1986, he studied in the Department of Mathematics and Mechanics of Moscow University of the former Soviet Union and obtained the associate doctor's degree (Ph.D.) of the former Soviet Union in 1991. From 1991 to 1993, he was engaged in postdoctoral research at the International Center for Theoretical Physics in Italy. He returned to school to teach in 1993. He has been a professor at the University of Science and Technology of China since 1995. He was elected as the Academician of Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2019.

He has been engaged in the research of topological dynamical system, ergodic theory and their application in combinatorial number theory in basic mathematics for a long time. He has published more than 90 papers in international high-level mathematics journals and made invited reports at international academic conferences for many times. In 2013, he won the 14th Chen Shengshen Prize in Mathematics; In 2018, he won the second prize of the National Natural Science Award (the first investigator); In 2020, he won the He Liang He Li Science and Technology Progress Award.