Niu has been an associated professor at the Department of Hydrology and Atmospheric Sciences HAS) since 2019 Fall. He has served as the Director of the UA Hydrometeorology Program since 2014. He joined HAS in 2013 Fall as an assistant professor and joined Biosphere 2 as an assistant research professor, The University of Arizona since the fall 2009. He has been working on developing processe-based hydrometeorological and ecohydroligcal models for use in global-scale Earth system models and evaluating the impacts of climate change on ecohydrological processes at catchment scales. He obatined his PhD at the Chinese Academy of Sciences CAS) in 1996. His major research interests are hydrometeorology, ecohydrology, land surface modeling, distributed hydrological modeling, global and regional climate modeling, and application of remote sensing to modeling. He earned the CCSM Community Climate System Model) distinguished achievement award by the National Center for Atmospheric Research NCAR) in 2008 for his work on developing a novel surface water and groundwater model for use in CCSM and Xuedu Fengzheng" best dissertation award by CAS in 1996.