Sihui Zhao was born in Shanghai, China. He got his Bachelor and Master degrees in Genetics from Fudan University. It was during his stay there that he was motivated to pursue an advance degree in biological science with more quantitative discipline.
He got his second master degree in bioinformatics from Indiana University, Bloomington where he was not satisfied only using existing tools. Therefore, he came to NC State University for the Ph.D. degree co-major in bioinformatics and statistics.
His doctoral research focuses on identification of short and degenerate motifs involved in alternative splicing by incorporating splicing profiles in multiple tissues. The ultimate goal is to build models to predict splicing outcome from sequences.