Dr. Jun Xiao is a Principle Investigator at the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, P.R. China. He joined IGDB in 2018 from the University of Pennsylvania. His work on the identification of transcription factors that bind response elements and recruit a polycomb repressive complex to modulate gene silencing in plants was highlighted in Nature Genetics in 2017. He received his PhD from the Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, where his thesis was selected as a ‘Hundred-Excellent Doctoral Dissertation of 2016’

The research in Xiao lab focus on genetic and epigenetic regulation of plant adaptation to changeable environments (with emphasis on water limits and ambient temperature turbulence) in bread wheat and model plant Arabidopsis. The research combines population genetics, epigenomics, transcriptome and reverse genetics to systematically and efficiently identify key regulators involved in plant adaptation and explore the elite allele to be used in the improvement of wheat variety with precise gene-editing technology and fast-breeding strategy.