Ying Xu is the "Regents and Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar" Chair of bioinformatics and computational biology and Professor 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). He also holds a ChangJiang Chair Professor position at Jilin University of China and guest professorship at 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 (Ph.D. thesis 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 has over 200 publications, including four books. He has also given over 150 invited/contributed talks at conferences, research organizations and universities. He enjoys teaching, and 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. 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. Since 2002, he has been co-organizing an annual "International Bioinformatics Workshop" (IBW) in China, targeted mainly at graduate students and postdocs, which has attracted over two thousand students/postdocs to attend by 2009. 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. Outside of work, he is a fan of Denver Broncos and Houston Rockets, especially when they play well. He is also an avid reader of Chinese history books. Also see Ying Xu @ Wikipedia