He then earned his Ph.D. in chemistry in 1982 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) under the direction of George M. Whitesides.

Wong was appointed as the Ernest W. Hahn Chair and professor of chemistry at the Scripps Research Institute and while he was a faculty member at Scripps, he also served as head of the Frontier Research Program on Glycotechnology at Riken in Japan[5] and director of the Genomics Research Center at Academia Sinica,[6] and was later appointed by the President of the Republic of China (Taiwan) as the President of Academia Sinica.

[7] Wong is best known for his original contributions to glycoscience, especially his development of chemo-enzymatic methods for the practical synthesis of oligosaccharides[8][9][10][11][12] and glycoproteins[13][14][15][16][17] and the hierarchical and programmable one-pot synthesis method for the rapid preparation of a large number of oligosaccharides.

He was quite disappointed by the false report and attempted to resign his position as president of the Academia Sinica twice.

[40] In February 2018, the Shilin District Prosecutors Office announced that charges of insider trading against Wong had been dropped, though an investigation into a possible failure in disclosing his assets during tech transfer of his invention had not yet concluded by the Control Yuan.