After obtaining PhD degree from University of Adelaide, Dr Song Weining carried out studies on cereal molecular biology and genomics in Australia, USA and Israel. He is currently at Northwest A&F University, China, with research focusing on the structural and functional genomics of wheat and barley. His lab has collected and maintained a large assembly of wild wheat and wild barley with a particular attention to improving drought and salt tolerance in cereals besides using these natural populations to study some of biology’s fundelmental questions such as speciation and the origin of biodiversity.