Prof. Xue Hongwei, researcher and doctoral supervisor, was born in September 1969 in Baofeng County, Henan Province. He is currently the Vice Chairman of SCAU Council and President of South China Agricultural University.

In 1991, he graduated from East China Normal University with a bachelor's degree in Biology. In 1996, he obtained a PhD degree in Science from the Shanghai Institute of Plant Physiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. From 1996 to 1998, he conducted postdoctoral research at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Plant Physiology in Germany. From December 1998 to December 2018, he served as an associate researcher, then researcher at the Institute of Plant Physiology and Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (since October 2002). During this period, he also served as the Deputy Director (2004-2008), Executive Deputy Director (2008-2009), and Director (2009-2014) of the Shanghai Institute of Plant Physiology and Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences; and the Director of the State Key Laboratory of Plant Molecular Genetics (2006-2017). From January 2019 to September 2023, he served as the Dean and Professor of the School of Agriculture and Biology of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Starting from September 2023, he serves as Vice Chairman of SCAU Committee and President of South China Agricultural University. He was selected into the Hundred Talents Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1998, received the The National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars in 2004, the China Youth Science and Technology Award in 2006, and was selected as a national candidate for the Hundred, Thousand, and Ten Thousand Talents Project in 2009. In 2016, he was chosen as a leading figure in the national Ten Thousand Talents Program for science and technology.

He is mainly engaged in the signal regulation mechanism of plant development and functional genomics of plant seed development. He is also well known for the systematic and original work in lipid signaling and its multi-level regulation of hormone signaling to regulate plant development, environmental and nutritional stress responses, important regulatory factors and post-translational regulation mechanisms of hormone signaling, and genetic and epigenetic regulation mechanisms of rice seed development, and these characteristic researches have promoted the development of related disciplines. Xue has published 2 monographs and more than 90 SCI papers as corresponding author, including Nature Plants, Nature Communications, Cell Research, Science Bulletin, Molecular Plant, Plant Cell, Autophagy, PNAS, etc., and  written field reviews in Current Opinion in Plant Biology. As the leader of the major research program Molecular regulatory mechanism of plant endosperm development and storage substance accumulation, the National Natural Science Foundation of China's innovative research group on the molecular mechanism of flowering time diversity in higher plants, and multiple research tasks from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Shanghai, Xue has received the second prize of Shanghai Science and Technology Progress Award and the second prize of Shanghai Natural Science Award.

Main academic titles: Executive Director of the Chinese Society of Plant Physiology and Molecular Biology, Chairman of the Cell and Developmental Professional Council, Executive Director of the Chinese Crop Science Society, Vice Chairman of the Shanghai Genetics Society, Co-editor-in-chief of Molecular Horticulture, Editorial Board member or the Deputy Editor-in-chief of Cell Research, Molecular Plant, Plant Cell & Environment, etc.

He is responsible for the overall administrative work of SCAU.