Engineering Biology for Microbial Biosynthesis of Plant-Derived Bioactive Compounds

Dr. Yongjun Wei, PhD, completed his bachelor’s degree in biology at Shaanxi Normal University, China, before pursuing his PhD in microbiology from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in 2014. Following his doctoral studies, he conducted a postdoctoral fellowship at the Chalmers University of Technology from 2014 to 2016. After that, he worked as an assistant researcher at CAS for a year before joining Zhengzhou University’s faculty in 2018. Currently he serves as an associate professor at Zhengzhou University, Dr. Wei has published over 80 peer-reviewed papers and holds more than 20 patents. Furthermore, he serves as an editorial board member or youth editor for over 10 different journals. His research primarily focuses on microbial production of plant bioactive natural products and the utilization of microorganisms for disease treatment and pollution eradication.

Dr. Xiao-Jun Ji, PhD, is currently a professor of bioengineering and biochemical engineering at Nanjing Tech University (NanjingTech), China. He received his BSc and PhD degrees from NanjingTech in 2005 and 2009 and conducted the visiting research in the Systems and Synthetic Biology lab headed by Prof. Jens Nielsen at Chalmers, Sweden during 2016 and 2017. His recent research focuses on biomanufacturing pharmaceutical and nutritional chemicals using the nonconventional yeasts through the metabolic engineering and the emerging synthetic biology tools. He has many awards such as the Fok Ying-Tung Foundation Young Scholars Award (2014), the Hou De-Bang Chemical Youth Award of CIESC (2016), the National Technological Invention Award of China (2018), the Excellent Young Scholars of NSFC (2019), and the Newton Advanced Fellowships of the Royal Society (2020).

Dr. Mingfeng Cao, PhD, is the Minjiang distinguished professor in the Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering, the director of the Institute of Bioengineering, and an honorary research fellow of the Tan Kah Kee Innovation Laboratory at the Xiamen Laboratory, China. He was awarded his PhD from the Nankai University in 2011, and between 2011 and 2013 worked as a research associate at the Tianjin Institute of Industrial Biotechnology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He completed postdoctoral studies at Iowa State University, USA and was a research scientist at the University of Illinois from 2018 to 2021. His research focuses on the development of synthetic biology and metabolic engineering strategies to establish microbial cell factories for value-added and green chemical production. Dr. Cao has published over 60 journal articles and holds 10 patents. He also serves as the editor-in-chief of Biotechnology Reports and the associate editor for journals such as Microbial Cell Factories and Biotechnology for Biofuels and Bioproducts.