Xiongyi grew up in Guilin – a small and quiet city in China known for its karst landscape. He received his B.S. Degree in Chemistry in 2010 from University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), where he worked on computational organic chemistry under the guidance of Prof. Yao Fu and Prof. Jing Shi. He then came to the United States and completed his graduate studies with Prof. John T. Groves at Princeton University as an HHMI International Predoctoral Fellow. During his PhD, Xiongyi has developed a series of Mn-catalyzed biomimetic C–H functionalization methods and collaborated with scientists at Merck and Mass General Hospital to develop new radiolabeling chemistry for applications in positron emission tomography (PET). After receiving his PhD in 2016, Xiongyi worked with Prof. Frances Arnold at Caltech, first as an NIH NRSA Postdoctoral Fellow and later as an NIH Pathway to Independence Postdoctoral Fellow. In the Arnold group, Xiongyi used directed evolution to engineer enzymes to catalyze reactions not previously present in biology. Xiongyi began as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the Johns Hopkins University in September 2019.