Ning is a professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Colorado School of Mines. He obtained his bachelor’s in Geotechnical Engineering at Wuhan University of Technology, and both his master’s and doctorate in Civil Engineering at John Hopkins University. He is well-known internationally for his work on stresses in variably saturated porous media, with his primary research interest in seeking common threads among basic soil physical phenomena, including fluid flow, chemical transport, heat transfer, stress, and deformation.