Caixia Gao is a Principal Investigator at the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology (IGDB), Chinese Academy of Sciences. Prior to joining IGDB in 2009, she served as a Research Scientist at DLF’s biotechnology group in Denmark, where she worked on plant genetic transformation and molecular biology. She completed her Ph.D. from the China Agricultural University in Beijing. Her research group focuses on developing precision genome editing technologies and applying their use to create new agricultural crops of the future. Her team has published over 100 papers on plant genome editing in Nature, Science, Cell, Nature Biotechnology and other journals. These papers have been cited over 16,000 times by the international science community.