(Zhejiang University, China)

Prof. Shao Jian Zheng is the Vice Dean of the Faculty of Agriculture, Life and Environment, and the Director of the Institute of Plant Biology, Zhejiang University, China. In the past years, he has been leading a research group focusing on the physiological and molecular responses of plants under various nutritional stresses including aluminum, cadmium toxicity and iron, phosphorus deficiency, and others, with particularly investigating the functions and regulation of stress-induced root exudates and different cell wall components, and the regulatory module of transcriptional factors involved in stress responses. In the recent years, he began to pay more attention to how root cells perceive the status of nutrient or toxic ions in the growth medium with ion specific receptors, then trigger a signaling pathway to transduce this signal to regulate the expression of the functional genes to alleviate the ionic stresses.  He has led over 20 research projects and published more than 120 papers in the peered reviewed international journals including Nature, Cell Research, Molecular Plant, Plant Cell, New phytologist and Plant Physiology and etc.