His research interests include social computing, data mining and machine learning and their applications in education. He was the recipient of 2020 ACM SIGKDD Rising Star Award, 2020 Distinguished Withrow Research Award, 2019 NSF Career Award, and 7 best paper awards (or runner-ups) including WSDM2018 and KDD2016. His dissertation won the 2015 KDD Best Dissertation runner up and Dean's Dissertation Award. He serves as conference organizers (e.g., KDD, SIGIR, WSDM and SDM) and journal editors (e.g., TKDD and ACM Books). He has published his research in highly ranked journals and top conference proceedings, which have received tens of thousands of citations with h-index 59 (Google Scholar) and extensive media coverage (Links).