Dr. Jinfa Zhang received his Doctorate in Agronomy from Huazhong Agricultural University in 1993 and Ph.D. in Plant Genetics and Molecular Biology from the University of Arkansas in 1999. He is currently director and a professor for the School of Agriculture at Tennessee Technological University in the US, and he is known for his approaches integrating genetics and genomics into cotton breeding. He previously served as a professor and the cotton breeder at New Mexico State University in the US between 2002 and 2024. He was a molecular cotton breeder with Monsanto in the US and a professor and lab director in cotton research at Huazhong Agricultural University in China. He has taught genetics and society, genetic techniques, plant breeding, experimental designs and statistical analysis, quantitative genetics, and molecular analysis of complex traits. He is a major advisor for numerous graduate students and postdocs, and he has trained more than 30 cotton geneticists and breeders from 9 countries. He has authored more than 220 refereed articles in international journals and 100 papers in Chinese. He was the first author or corresponding author for numerous papers in cotton genomics including new marker development (such as cleaved AFLP, ATG-AFLP and promoter-based markers), linkage mapping, association mapping, candidate gene mapping, map-based cloning, transgenics, RNA-seq, proteomics, and gene families. He has developed the first QTL database (www.cottonqtldb.org) for the cotton community. He serves or served as an editor or associate editor for many journals including Scientific Reports, Molecular Genetics and Genomics, BMC Genomics, BMC Genetics, International Journal of Genomics, The Crop Journal, Euphytica, Journal of Crop Improvement, Journal of Cotton Science, and Journal of Cotton Research. He served on the plant genome panels for NSF and the plant breeding panels for USDA-NIFA in the US. He received the prestigious Cotton Genetic Research Award from the National Cotton Council of USA in 2020.Prof. Chittaranjan Kole is an internationally reputed scientist with an illustrious professional career of spanning over thirty-four years and original contributions in the fields of plant genomics, biotechnology and molecular breeding leading to the publication of more than 160 quality research articles and reviews. He has edited over 100 books for the leading publishers of the world including Springer, Wiley-Blackwell and Taylor and Francis Group. His scientific contributions and editing acumen have been appreciated by seven Nobel Laureates including Profs. Norman Borlaug, Arthur Kornberg, Werner Arber, Phillip Sharp, Günter Blobel, Lee Hartwell and Roger Kornberg. He has been honored with a number of Fellowships, Honorary Fellowships, and national and international awards including the Outstanding Crop Scientist award conferred by the International Crop Science Society. He has served at many prestigious positions in academia including as Vice-Chancellor of BC Agricultural university, Project Coordinator of Indo-Russian Center of Biotechnology in India, and Director of Research of Institute of Nutraceutical Research of Clemson University, in USA. He worked also in the Pennsylvania State University and Clemson University as Visiting Professor in USA. Recently, he has been awarded with the Raja Ramanna Fellow by the Department of Energy, Government of India. He is also heading the International Climate-Resilient Crop Genomics Consortium and International consortium for Phytomedomics and Nutriomics as their founding Principal Coordinator.Dr. Yuxian Zhu obtained his Ph. D at Cornell University in December 1989 and became a full professor at Peking University in 1994 after two short-term post-doctoral fellowships. He is an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, an academician of the Academy of Sciences for Developing Countries, and a professor at Wuhan University/Peking University. He is the Dean of the Institute for Advanced Study at Wuhan University, Vice Chairman of the Chinese Society of Plant Physiology and Molecular Biology, and Executive Deputy Editor-in-Chief of “Science China·Life Sciences.” Dr. Zhu has published more than 130 peer-reviewed scientific research papers. He is the author of a nation-wide undergraduate textbook entitled “Modern Molecular Biology” and “Experimental Techniques of Molecular Biology”. He has made outstanding contributions to the molecular mechanism of cotton fiber elongation and cotton genomics research. He won the second National Natural Science Award in 2011, the HLHL Science and Technology Progress Award in 2012, and the second prize of the National Text Books Award in 2021.
