Rui-Ming Xu received his Ph.D. degree in Physics from Brandeis University in 1990. Following post-doctoral training in physics with Steven Weinberg at UT Austin and C.N. Yang at SUNY Stony Brook, he changed his field of research to structural biology in 1993 at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where he rose to the rank of Professor. He joined NYU School of Medicine as a tenured professor in 2005, and in 2008 have moved to Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, where he is currently Director and an Investigator. His research research interest has been on molecular mechanisms of eukaryotic gene repression, with particular emphasis on epigenetic inheritance and RNA processing.