Jin is a professor at the National Human Genome Center and Fudan's Institute of Genetics, both in Shanghai.

[1] He is the principal investigator of East Asian populations for the Genographic Project which collects DNA samples to map historical human migration patterns around the world.

[3] He earned bachelor's and master's degrees in genetics in 1985 and 1987 respectively, both at Fudan University,[3] where he was a student of Tan Jiazhen.

[4] He then moved to the United States to earn his doctorate at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, graduating in 1994.

[8][9] He "could not find any evidence that is consistent with the hypothesis of independent origin in China" in the 1998 study which used genetic markers called microsatellites to compare Chinese populations.