He Jifeng graduated from the mathematics department of Fudan University in 1965. From 1965 to 1985, he was a teacher at Huadong Normal University. During 1980–81, he was a visiting scholar at Stanford University and the University of San Francisco in California, USA. From 1984 to 1998, He Jifeng was a Senior Research Fellow at the Programming Research Group in the Oxford University Computing Laboratory. He worked extensively on formal aspects of computing science. In particular, he worked with Prof. Sir Tony Hoare, latterly on Unifying Theories of Programming, resulting in a book of that name.