Yajun Wang received his Ph.D. degree in Biology from the Institute of Botany, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, where he worked on the adult partial resistance of barley against barley leaf rust. Then he conducted his post-doctoral research to study the partial resistance and nonhost resistance of barley against various grass rust species at Wageningen University and Research. He continued the barley-rust interaction research at the Center for Desert Agriculture of KAUST, meanwhile, he explored using the genomic approach to accelerate gene cloning in wheat forward genetics.