Hong Xu graduated from Nankai University with a B.S. in 1995 and received a M.S. from Peking University in 1998. He earned his Ph.D. in 2004 from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where he worked with Craig Montell. studying the Drosophila visual transduction. Dr. Xu did his postdoctoral research with Dr. Patrick O’Farrell at the University of California, San Francisco where he developed a novel arroach to select for mitchondrial mutations and began to study mitochondrial genetics in fruit flies. Dr. Xu joined NHLBI as a tenure track investigaotr in 2010 and was promoted to a senior investigaotr with tenure in 2017.