Professor, Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

Dr. Qiaomei Fu holds a Masters degree in Archaeometry from Chinese Academy of Sciences. She finished her PhD under the supervision of Svante Pääbo at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) Leipzig in 2013. Thereafter, she worked as a postdoc Research Fellow in the population genetics Group of David Reich in the genetics department of Harvard Medical School. Since August 2008, she is a Research scientist at the MPI-EVA. And from January 2016, she became the head of the ancient DNA lab in the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP), Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China. She is engaged in evolutionary genetics and population genetics.

Senior Research Fellow, The University of Queensland, Australia

Dr Hickey is a plant breeder and crop geneticist within the Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation at The University of Queensland, Australia. He leads an innovative team conducting discovery and applied research on Australia’s most important cereal crops, wheat and barley. This includes understanding the genetics of key traits like drought adaptation and disease resistance, plus the development of novel technologies to assist plant breeders. Dr Hickey has played a pivotal role in the integration of leading-edge breeding technologies, such as the rapid generation advance technology ‘speed breeding’ with genomic selection and genome editing. His advice for speed breeding crops is sought internationally and the technology is now adopted by plant breeding programs worldwide, which is fast-tracking development of improved crop varieties for farmers. His research outcomes have featured in 57 refereed publications, including articles in high profile journals Nature Plants, Nature Protocols and Nature Biotechnology. Lee is a prolific science communicator and his research outcomes have appeared in mainstream media such as BBC World News, National Geographic, and the New York Times. He is passionate about training the next generation of plant breeders and currently mentors 10 PhD students, while 9 of his previous graduates now work for leading plant breeding companies and high-profile research institutes around the globe.

Professor of Botany, Kunming Institute of Botany Chinese Academy of Sciences, China

Dr. De-Zhu Li is a professor of botany at Kunming Institute of Botany (KIB), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). He served as KIB’s deputy director (1997-2005), director (2005-2014), and president of CAS Kunming Branch (2014-2019) and vice president of Botanical Society of China (2008-2018). He was awarded an OBE for his contributions to biodiversity conservation by the UK in 2010. He is now head of CAS’ Germplasm Bank of Wild Species (2007-), member of scientific advisory committee for International Barcode of Life initiative (2010-) and council member of International Association of Plant Taxonomy (2017-). Dr. Li has authored 390 papers in academic journals including Nature Plants, PNAS, Trends in Plant Science, Systematic Biology, Molecular Plant, and Ecology Letters, as well as 22 monographs and books, including the bamboo account of the Flora of China, and A Dictionary of the Families and Genera of Chinese Vascular Plants.

Professor, Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China

The research topics of Meng-Hua Li consist of population and conservation genomics of domestic sheep and their wild ancestors. He is interested in characterizing the climate-induced impact on the genome of different native sheep breeds which have adapted to a diverse range of climates or environments. He also is interested in characterizing the genomic diversity of domestic and wild sheep (e.g., Asian Mouflon, Argali, Urial, and so on) using different types of markers such as whole-genome SNP, mtDNA, and Y-chromosomal markers. Currently, he is identifying the genetic variants associated with various phenotypic traits in sheep using whole-genome sequences at a high-depth.

Dr. Muranaka obtained his Ph.D. in Agriculture from Kyoto University 1993. After he finished a master’s course at the Graduate School of Agriculture, Kyoto University in 1985 and entered Sumitomo Chemical Co., Ltd. and conducted research on plant biotechnology. He left Sumitomo Chemical Co., Ltd. in 2001 and joined RIKEN Plant Science Center as a Team Leader. In 2007, he moved to Yokohama City University as a full professor, then in 2010, moved to Osaka University. He also has a position in RIKEN Center for Sustainable Resource Center, Japan as a Senior Visiting Scientist. His recent research projects especially focus on phytochemical genomics and application of genome editing for metabolic engineering and crop improvement. He has been an Editorial Board of Plant and Cell Physiology. From 2016 to 2018, he was assigned as a President of Japanese Society for Plant Cell and Molecular Biology. He has been on the board of The Japanese Society for Genome Editing since 2016. He received an Academic Award from Japanese Society for Plant Cell and Molecular Biology in 2019.

Professor, Northwestern Polytechnical University, USA

Prof. Wen Wang has been studying evolutionary genomics of natural and domestic species, with focus on origin and evolution of genetic novelties in genomes. He is now a professor of Center for Ecological and Environmental Sciences, Northwestern Polytechnical University, and is also an adjunct professor of Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He has led the international Ruminant Genome Project, and has achieved significant progresses recently.