Team

Qiang He has received training in genetics, plant resources, and bioinformatics. He holds a B.C. degree from Shandong Agricultural University in China, and an M.S. and Ph.D. from Kongju National University in Korea. He conducted his postdoctoral research at the Institute of Crop Sciences, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. He joined the Institute of Crop Sciences, CAAS in 2023, where he serves as the Principal Investigator of the Crop Bioinformatics and Big Data research group. His research interests include genomics-based crop germplasm/gene resource mining, which involves using bioinformatics and genomics tools to explore and utilize superior crop germplasm resources, and big data-driven intelligent breeding design, focusing on leveraging big data for crop genomic selection breeding and biological breeding design.

Email: heqiang@caas.cn

Peng Zhou graduated from Xi'an Jiaotong Univeristy majoring in biological engineering and computer science. He then obtained his PhD degree in the University of Minnesota Twin Cities and continued postdoc training there. In 2021 he returned to China and became a researcher at Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS). Using a combination of classical genetics, comparative genomics and multi-omics approaches, he works to understand the regulatory mechanism of gene expression during plant development and under stress conditions, identify key cis-regulatory elements and transcription factors for crop improvement. His research interests also include constructing plant gene regulatory networks, training machine learning models to predict temporal/spatial gene expression patterns, as well as understanding the molecular mechanism of heterosis.

Email: pzhou@caas.cn

Qiong Lu graduated from China Agricultural University in 2024 with a PhD degree and was awarded the National Scholarship and the honorary title of “Outstanding Graduate of Beijing”. During her PhD, she focused on the research of crop germplasm and genetic breeding based on big data. She completed the collection of weedy and cultivated broomcorn millet accessions and constructed a comprehensive variation map, analyzed the domestication origins and the genetic architecture of agronomic traits. After joining He-Lab, she has been engaged in the utilization of germplasm resources based on bioinformatics and multi-omics data, and research related to genomic selection breeding and biobreeding design.

Email: luqiong@caas.cn

Zihao Wang obtained his PhD degree in the China Agricultural University, where he continued postdoctoral training and received education in genetics, genomics and bioinformatics. Prior to that, he graduated from Sichuan Agricultural University with a major in agronomy. In 2025, he joined the Institute of Crop Sciences at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. His research interests include the evolution and adaptation of crop germplasms and complex traits under natural and artificial selection, the development of computational methods for integrating and utilizing multi-omics data, and biology-informed, big data-driven crop genome and breeding design for future agriculture.

Email: wangzihao@caas.cn