Liwei was born and raised in Hefei, China. He received his B.S. degree in chemistry from Wuhan University, where he conducted undergraduate research in the laboratory of Prof. Aiwen Lei on transition-metal catalysis. He then moved to the United States to pursue his doctoral studies at Johns Hopkins University under the direction of Prof. Marc M. Greenberg. During his Ph.D. studies, he developed photochemical precursors to investigate the mechanisms and biological consequences of oxidative DNA damage, earning his Ph.D. in chemistry in 2019. Following his doctoral studies, Liwei joined the laboratory of Prof. H. Tom Soh at Stanford University as a postdoctoral scholar and research scientist. There, he developed “reverse translation,” a strategy that converts peptide sequence information into DNA reporters and enables massively parallel peptide sequencing with single-molecule sensitivity and single-amino-acid resolution. In 2026, Liwei began his independent career as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign. His research lies at the intersection of bioanalytical chemistry, chemical biology, and organic chemistry. The Zheng Group develops new chemistries that transform protein sequences, molecular structures, and metabolite levels into outputs readable by high-throughput DNA sequencing. These technologies aim to advance single-molecule proteomics, aptamer engineering, and single-cell and spatial molecular profiling.