Lei Fu was born in Xinyang Xin County, Henan Province in January 1970. From September 1990 to May 1995 he was studying at the Mathematics Department of Rice University and received his Ph.D degree. From August 1995 to August 1997, he was teaching at the Mathematics Department of Indiana University, after which he accepted the invitation from Professor Shiing-Shen Chern and returned to China for academic research. From August 1997 to June 1999 he worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the Nankai Institute of Mathematics (renamed as Chern Institute of Mathematics since 2005) and as professor since June 1999, then he was appointed as the director of Nankai Institute of Mathematics since July 2012. In September 2016, he moved to the Tsinghua University and worked as a professor of the Yau Mathematics Sciences Center since then.

Professor Lei Fu’s research interests focus on modern algebraic geometry and algebraic number theory. He made a series of achievements in the fields of l－adic cohomology theory and Galois representations, and published a number of articles in many leading American and Swiss mathematical journals. He has been receiving the special government allowance from China's State Council since 2002, and received the Outstanding Young Scholar Award of Hong Kong Qiu Shi Science and Technologies Foundation in 2000, as well as recognition from the Fok Ying-Tong Education Foundation for Young Teachers (2001), the Trans-Century Training Programs Foundation for the Talents by Ministry of Education of China (2002), and the New Century Talents Project of China (2004), and awarded as the Distinguished Young Scholar of the National Natural Science Foundation (2005), and one of the candidates of the China's Top Ten Outstanding Youths (2009).