Jieyu was born and raised in Hunan province of China, with the Hunan people’s spirit, “Care about the world, Dare to be a pioneer”. During undergraduate study, Jieyu was aware of the importance of agriculture, and tried to act out her belief that “Food science is to make a better world”. To achieve this lifetime research goal, she joined State Key Laboratory of Plant Physiology and Biochemistry from Zhejiang University, and received her Ph.D. in 2013. Jieyu’s graduate research revealed that phosphorylation of rice phosphate (Pi) transporters was critical for their intracellular trafficking in response to Pi-stress, which suggest a potential breeding strategy to develop crop plants with enhanced Pi uptake efficiency.

In 2014, Jieyu joined Professor William Lucas research group in Department of Plant Biology, University of California-Davis, as a postdoctoral fellow. During her postdoctoral career, she learned that phloem functions as an integrator of systemic signaling system in plant physiology and development. Her research provided an insight into the role played by the phloem, in terms of long-distance signaling mechanisms under Pi-stress.

Jieyu joined Global Institute of Food Security in 2018, to advance the current stage of her scientific knowledge regarding long-distance signaling in nutrient homeostasis of plants. She is eager to continue her research journey to identify and characterize functional systemic signaling agents, including proteins, mRNAs and micro-RNA molecules, in the regulation of macronutrient (N, Pi and K) homeostasis at the whole-plant level, and achieve her research goal of developing optimized crops with sustainable yield under limited nutrient inputs.