Manjun Cai was born in Shantou, Guangdong Province, China. She graduated with a Bsc Agriculture from South China Agricultural University in 2013; she received her doctorate (crop genetics and breeding) at the Huazhong Agricultural University in 2019 after studying for 6 years in the group of Prof. Dr. Fazhan Qiu, Laboratory of maize molecular breeding. She then worked at Institute of Microbiology, Guangdong Academy of Sciences.