Professor Gong received his BS and MS degrees from Nanjing University and his PhD degree from the University of Waterloo, Canada in 1990. He started his academic career at York University and then the University of Calgary. In 1994, he joined the University of California, Berkeley where he rose through the academic ranks to full Professor in 2001. He became the founding Chair of the Department of Earth System Science in 2016 and Dean of the Faculty of Science in 2017 at Tsinghua University.