She gained bachelor's (1987), master's (1990) and doctorate (1993) degrees at Shandong University, and subsequently lectured in the mathematics department from 1993.
She became the Chen Ning Yang Professor of the Center for Advanced Study, Tsinghua University in 2005.
In February 2005, it was reported that Wang and co-authors Yiqun Lisa Yin and Hongbo Yu had found a method to find collisions in the SHA-1 hash function, which is used in many of today's mainstream security products.
"[7] In 2019, she became the first female winner of China's Future Science Prize for her pioneering contribution in cryptography.
[8] In 2020, she was awarded the Levchin Prize “for groundbreaking work on the security of collision resistant hash functions”.