He obtained his Ph.D. degree under the advice of Björn Engquist in the Department of Mathematics at University of California, Los Angeles in 1989.

He currently holds a professorship at the Center for Machine Learning Research and the School of Mathematical Sciences at Peking University.

He is a cofounder of Moqi Inc in Beijing, which has developed and provided fingerprint recognition AI technology for the Ministry of Public Security of the People's Republic of China.

[4][5] He is a major stakeholder of Beijing based big data analysis company PrinceTechs[citation needed] and the director of a project of Program 973, a basic research program initiated by the People's Republic of China to achieve technology and strategic edge in various scientific fields and especially the development of the rare earth minerals industry.

[6] He received Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering in 1996,[7] and Feng Kang Prize in Scientific Computing in 1999.

He was invited to speak at the International Congress of Mathematicians (2002), and at Annual Meeting of the American Mathematical Society (2003).

[16] He will receive the ICIAM Maxwell Prize 2023[17] at the 9th International Congress for Industrial and Applied Mathematics for "his seminal contributions to applied mathematics and in particular on analysis and application of machine learning algorithms, multi-scale modeling, the modeling of rare events and stochastic partial differential equations".

Jiequn Han, Arnulf Jentzen, Weinan E, "Solving high-dimensional partial differential equations using deep learning", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(34), 8505–8510 (2018).