In graduate school at Shanghai Medical University, Rao was roommates with Lu Bai [zh], now also an eminent neurobiologist.
He discovered the big brain gene, which is required for a binary decision in neural development: to form a neuron or an epidermal cell.
[6] After graduating from UCSF, Rao received a Helen Hay Whitney fellowship for postdoctoral research in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Harvard University, where he worked on embryonic induction in vertebrates.
[citation needed] In 1999, he demonstrated that the secreted protein encoded by the Slit gene was a repellent guidance cue for axons.
[citation needed] He participated directly in the reform or establishment of five institutes and writes about science and culture for a wide audience.
While in the U.S., he began his involvement with academia in China, working with Lu Bai and Mei Lin to establish a joint lab in Shanghai in 1995.
[9] The year after the article, both Rao and Shi failed to be named to the Chinese Academy of Sciences in the first round of voting among members in its biennial membership elections.
[8][11] Since 2007, Rao successfully established the tenure track system in the School of Life Sciences, with international peer reviews of academic merits as the important criteria for hiring, promotion and firing.
[3] In 2009, two years after his return to China, Rao renounced his U.S. citizenship; in a written statement to the U.S. embassy in Beijing during that process, he criticized the US government for its behaviors after the September 11th attacks.
[14] In a 2011 letter to National Science Council head Lee Lou-chuang, Rao proposed that a paper in which Peking University researchers had collaborated with National Tsing Hua University researchers in Taiwan identify each institution's location without the use of political terms "People's Republic" or "Republic".