Biography

Professor Xiaofeng Cao leads the Center for Genome Biology at the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology and is the co-director of the Centre of Excellence for Plant and Microbial Science, jointly established by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the John Innes Centre in the UK. She has a bachelor’s in applied biochemistry from Peking University, a master’s in biochemistry from China Agricultural University and a PhD from the College of Life Sciences, Peking University. During her PhD, Professor Cao was a visiting scholar at the John Innes Centre and later a postdoctoral research fellow at Washington State University. She was a research associate in the Department of Molecular, Cell and Developmental Biology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). After she won CAS’s Young Talented Investigator Award (2002) she returned to work in China. She has received numerous awards for her research, and was elected as a CAS academician in 2015 and a TWAS fellow in 2016. She is married and has two children.