Dr. Zhu Yuxian (born in December 1955), a well-known Plant Physiologist in China. He was born in Fuyang, Zhejiang Province. He is a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and also a member for The World Academy of Sciences for developing countries. Currently, he is the Dean of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Wuhan University. He is mainly interested in the research of plant molecular biology, especially gene regulations during cotton fiber development.
In 1982, he graduated from Zhejiang Agricultural University (Zhejiang University at present). Then he went to study in the Department of Plant Biology, Cornell University, and got his doctoral degree there in 1989. After that, he was engaged in a postdoctoral research at the Department of Biology, Washington University. In 1991, he returned to China, and worked in School of Life Sciences, Peking University. In 2001, he was nominated as a Changjiang Scholar. This is a higher education development program in the People's Republic of China provided by the Ministry of Education and Li Ka Shing Foundation. In 2011, he was elected as a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In 2013, he was elected as a member of The World Academy of Sciences for developing countries. On April 4th, 2014, Dr. Zhu joined Wuhan University, and began to work as the Dean of the Institute for Advanced Studies in our university.
He concurrently serves as the vice president of the Botanical Society of China. He is the Chairman of the National High Education Committee for Biology Curriculum, the Ministry of Education of China since 2013. He is a member of the National Advisory Committee on “Bio-safety of Genetically Modified Organisms” for the Ministry of Agriculture of China. From 2002, he served as the Director for the State Key Laboratory of Protein and Plant Gene Research.
Since 1991, Dr. Zhu has obtained and successfully carried out quite many important research projects. He is best known by his contributions in cotton genomics, in elucidating the molecular mechanisms with regard to cotton fiber cell development and Arabidopsis stem cell differentiation. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed research articles, including Nature Genetics, Nature Biotechnology, Nature Communications, PNAS and Plant Cell etc. His Monographs, Modern Molecular Biology, is widely used as the textbook throughout the nation. He translated several English books into Chinese, such as Making PCR. A Story of Biotechnology by Paul Rabinow and The Birth of the Cell by Henry Harris.
