About half energy of the radiation from cosmic star formation is absorbed and re-emitted by dust into the far-infrared.  How dust attenuates star formation in galaxies over cosmic time remains to be understood. I will introduce recent progresses in exploring the relationships between star formation, dust attenuation (IRX=L_IR/L_UV)  and other galaxy parameters. Particularly, we found that dust attenuation of star-forming galaxies obeys an empirical relation, jointly determined by IR luminosity, galaxy size, metallicity and axial ratio.  We argue that this empirical relation is fundamental in understanding galaxy dust attenuation because it also holds for distant SFGs out to z = 3.  Combined with the scaling relations related to galaxy stellar mass, size and metallicity, a comprehensive picture emerges to link star formation, structure buildup and chemical enrichment together.  

XianZhong Zheng is a research professor in Purple Mountain observatory, CAS,  and leading a research group on galaxy formation and wide-field survey. He obtained his PhD in astrophysics in 2002 from the National Astronomical Observatories, CAS, and worked as a postdoctoral fellow in Observatoire de Paris-Meudon and the Max-Planck Institute in Astronomy (MPIA) in Heidelberg from 2003 to 2007. He joined Purple Mountain Observatory in 2007 with support through the CAS hundred Talents Program. His research works were mostly on observational studies of galaxy formation and evolution, having >90 publications. He is also leading the 2.5meter wide-field survey telescope (WFST) project, recently funded by university of Science and telescope of China to monitor the northern sky for time-domain events, solar system objects, stars and structures of the Milky way and the nearby universe.