Dr. Ainong Shi obtained a B.S. in Plant Pathology and Entomology from Zhejiang University, an M.S. in Plant Breeding and Genetics from the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, and a Ph.D. from North Carolina State University, co-majoring in Plant Pathogen and Crop Science. He is a tenure-track associate professor in the Department of Horticulture, University of Arkansas. His lab is focused on classic and molecular breeding, genetics and cultivars, and germplasm development and release in vegetable crops. Dr. Shi’s team conducts QTL mapping and genome-wide association studies to identify SNP markers associated with agronomic, abiotic, and biotic traits, using whole-genome sequencing and resequencing, ddRADseq, and GBS, and performs genome breeding with marker-assisted selection (MAS) and genomic selection (GS) in vegetable crops. Dr. Shi has received more than 30 research grants totaling over USD 9.6 million as the Principal Investigator (PI) from a variety of funding agencies, such as the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Specialty Crop Research Initiative (SCRI). To date, Dr. Shi has published 150 research articles in peer-reviewed scientific journals such as “BMC Genomics”, “Crop Science”, “Frontiers in Plant Science”, “Horticulture Research”, “Phytopathology”, “Plant Disease”, “PLoS ONE”, “Scientific Reports”, “The Plant Genome”, and “Theoretic and Applied Genetics”.