Born in 1966, he graduated from the Department of Physics, Ningxia University, in 1986. He obtained his master's degree (1989) and doctoral degree (1992) in Computational Mechanics from Dalian University of Technology. After completing his postdoctoral research at Chengdu University of Science and Technology (now Sichuan University) in June 1994, he joined Tsinghua University, where he served as an assistant professor, associate professor (since December 1994), professor (since December 2003), doctoral supervisor (since September 2004), director of the Institute of Dynamics and Control (2007–2013), Party Branch Secretary of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (2013–2016), and head of the department (2016–2020).

In 2004, he was selected as an inaugural recipient of the Ministry of Education's New Century Excellent Talents Support Program. He received many awards, including one first-class Provincial/Ministerial-Level Natural Science Award, three second-class Provincial/Ministerial-Level Natural Science Awards, one first-class Science and Technology Progress Award, the Qian Ling-Xi Achievement Award for Computational Mechanics, the Du Qing-Hua Award of Computational Methods in Engineering, the ICACM Computational Mechanics Award, the ICACM Fellows Award, the Beijing Distinguished Teachers Award, the Beijing Educational Innovation Award, the Second Prize of the Beijing Higher Education Teaching Achievement Award, and the “Tsinghua New Century Teaching Achievement Award". He also serves as Vice Chairman of Beijing Society for Vibration Engineering, Associate Editor of International Journal of Mechanics and Materials in Design, and on the editorial boards of several other domestic and international journals. Additionally, he is an Executive Council Member of the International Chinese Computational Mechanics. He has published four monographs, four textbooks, and four teaching software packages, as well as over 180 journal articles. Since 2015, he has been consistently named to the Elsevier’s "Most Cited Chinese Researchers" list and was included in Stanford University's "World's Top 2％ Scientists" list in 2022 and 2024.

He has taught courses including Theoretical Mechanics, Computational Dynamics, and Finite Element Method. The Finite Element Method course was rated as "Excellent Teacher and Course" by the 2015 graduates, and his Theoretical Mechanics course was selected as a benchmark course at Tsinghua University in 2019.