Ying Xu is a professor and the "Regents and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar" chair of bioinformatics and computational biology in the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Department, and the director of the Institute of Bioinformatics, University of Georgia (UGA). Before joining UGA in Sept 2003, he was a senior staff scientist and group leader at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), where he still holds a joint position. He also holds guest professorship at Jilin University, Peking University, and Zhejiang University of China, and National Central University and National Cheng-Kung University of Taiwan. He received his Ph.D. degree in theoretical computer science from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1991. His Ph.D. thesis was on development of efficient algorithms for matroid intersection problems (supervised by Hal Gabow). Between 1991 and 1993, he was a visiting assistant professor at Colorado School of Mines. He started his bioinformatics career in 1993 when he joined Ed Uberbacher's group at ORNL to work on the GRAIL project. His current research interests include (a) computational inference and modeling of biological pathways and networks, particularly for microbial organisms, (b) cancer bioinformatics, (c) comparative genome analyses, and (d) protein structure prediction and modeling. He is interested in both bioinformatic tool development and study of biological problems using in silico approaches. He has over 200 publications, including four books ("Current Topics in Computational Molecular Biology", MIT Press, 2002, "Microbial Functional Genomics", John Wiley and Sons, 2004, "Computational Methods for Protein Structure Prediction and Modeling", Springer, 2006, "Computational Methods for Understanding Archaeal and Bacterial Genomes", World Scientific Publishing, 2008). He has also given over 150 invited/contributed talks at conferences, research organizations and universities. He has (co)developed a number of bioinformatic software, including GRAIL II, GRAIL EXP, PROSPECT, CUBIC, PMAP and EXCAVATOR. He enjoys teaching and interacting with students. His lab currently has a number of Ph.D. students and undergraduate student researchers (he is also interested in supervising high school students and teachers to conduct bioinformatics research). He has (co)taught a number of bioinformatics courses at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. Over the years, he has been actively involved in cummunity services within the field of computational biology and bioinformatics. In 2007-2008, he is the Program Committee (co)Chair of the Computational Systems Bioinformatics Conference (CSB'08). He currently serves on the editorial boards of four international journals. He is also the (co)editor-in-chief of the "Bioinformatics and Computational Biology" book series by World Scientific Publishing. In addition, he has served on review panels/study sections for major funding agencies such as NSF, NIH and DOE. Since 2002, he has been co-organizing an annual "International Bioinformatics Workshop" (IBW) in China, mainly targeted at graduate students, which has attracted over one thousand students/postdocs to attend by 2007. Ying Xu was born and grew up in northeastern China. He received his undergraduate and early graduate education (MS thesis supervised by Jiwen Guan) from Jilin University where both his parents have been teaching chemistry since 1950's (Mom retired in 2003; and Dad is still going strong leading an active research program there). He is married with one Fourteen-year old son. His wife is a computer software engineer. Hu-Niu is their family dog (a cross between chow and collie). Outside of work, he is a fan of Denver Broncos and Houston Rockets, especially when they play well. He is also a avid reader of Chinese history books.