Song is originally from China. He received his bachelor degree from Southeast University, Nanjing, with the major of electrical engineering. After graduation he entered Data Communication Bureau of Zhejiang province, a brach of China Telecom, working as a network engineer. In 2001, he started his graduate study in Iowa State University, and two years later earned his master degree in computer engineering.During these two years he was working as a research assistant in VRAC (virtual reality application center) of Iowa State University, and focused on developing high performance CFD (computational fluid dynamics) visualization tools in virtual environments. Now Song's research interests are in the area of bioinformatics, 3D visualization and software engineering.

He is working on a project which uses visualization technology to improve the understandability of bioinformatic computational results.