Chongchun Zeng was born in Kunming -- a city in the mountainous southwestern China. Having realized that he could not do anything else, he went to Nankai University in northern China as an undergraduate student majoring in mathematics. His Ph.D study in mathematics was at Brigham Young University. After learning some dynamical systems and differential equations, he finished his dissertation on normally hyperbolic invariant manifolds for semiflows and started his career as a Courant Instructor at Courant Institute, NYU, in 1997. After 3 years as an instructor at NYU and then 5 years as an assistant professor at the University of Virginia, he moved further south to Georgia Institute of  Technology as an associate professor in August 2005 and then a professor since 2009.