Ying Xu, born in Jilin Province, China in 1960, graduated from the Computer Science Department, Jilin University (JLU) with a B.S. and a M.S. degree in 1982 and 1985, respectively. He then attended the University of Colorado at Boulder starting in 1986, and received a Ph.D. degree in computer science in 1991. He is the “Regents and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar” Chair of bioinformatics and computational biology and Professor of bioinformatics and computational biology, University of Georgia (UGA), Director of JLU-UGA Computational Systems Biology (JCSB) Lab and Director of Institute of Bioinformatics, UGA (2004-2011). He holds a Changjiang Chair position in 2009 and a Qianren (the Thousand Talents Plan) Chair Professor position in 2012 at Jilin University of China.

Xu is a computational biologist with current research interests in cancer systems biology and microbial bioinformatics. His publications in bioinformatics of over 300 research articles involve the aspects of (a) Study of Computational Methods and Modeling of Biological Pathway and Network; (b) Cancer Bioinformatics; (c) Comparative Genomic Analysis; (d) Protein Structure Prediction and Modeling in international journals and workshops, such as NAR (Nucleic Acids Research), PNAS (Proc Natl Acad Sci USA), Bioinformatics, etc. and of five books in MIT (2002), Wiley (2004), Springer (2006, 2014) and Imperial College (2008), with h-index over 40. His research work has been sponsored over 20 million dollars by National Science Foundation (NSF), Department of Energy (DOE), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Georgia Research Alliance. He was honored Georgia Cancer Coalition Distinguished Scholar in 2003 and American Association for Advancement of Science Fellow in 2007.